In this, the first Obama Christmas, the nation finds itself tentative, apprehensive, uncharacteristically indecisive. Some say that a new era of frugality is upon us. They say this with an air of triumph, as if parsimony were a good thing, when in fact asking Americans to tighten their purse strings is like asking the French to lay off the bouillabaisse. True, there's been a lot of talk lately about America hitting the reset button and returning to its core values. But America's core values have never included being tight with a buck. We make stuff, we sell stuff and we buy stuff. We have never been cheap. It's just not in our nature. The last time anybody suggested playing it close to the vest was when Jimmy Carter gave his infamous malaise speech. The American people had a quick response to that: Next customer.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Journal's columnists select the best bargains and splurges of the season. Mick Coulas

Happily, many American shoppers will swing for the fences in the next month, convinced that the only way to defibrillate this economy is to start spending again. You can see that in some of the Christmas gifts they're buying. They're scooping up cameras, netbooks, flat-screen TVs, The Beatles: Rock Band. They're shelling out for jewelry, expensive footwear, Gucci bags. They're putting iPhones, accessories for iPhones, apps for iPhones, and Droids on their charge cards. And they're buying offbeat merchandise. Home Depot is hawking a set of reasonably priced, infrared personal saunas, including a two-seater that, as of Friday afternoon, was going for just $999. As an added come-on, the sauna even has an MP3 hookup, which just closes the deal for me. Unload a few hundred thousand of these babies and will this economy ever start percolating! Meanwhile, for $299.99, Wal-Mart will sell you the pint-sized, two-speed (2 and 4 mph) Ducati Monster Motorcycle Ride-On, which gets tykes started on the long and winding road toward purchasing their first Harley. The absolute best goodie might be the VuZix iWear AV310 Widescreen Video Glasses, complete with a built-in high-resolution display screen, that provide the wearer with a virtual Imax experience anywhere he goes ($229.00 on These three items are the kinds of non-essential big-ticket Christmas gifts that made America great. Or rather, let us say that buying these kinds of Christmas gifts is what made America great.


Also less than encouraging is the section in the December issue of Martha Stewart Living where the doyenne of décor explains how to make inexpensive cardboard gift boxes that are indistinguishable from lumps of coal. For a well-heeled individual to behave this way at this juncture in our history sends the worst message since George H.W. Bush bought several pairs of socks at a J.C. Penney in the middle of a recession. You're really not helping to lift the mood of the country, Martha. You're really not.

Souvenirs of Black Friday 2009: Shoppers, above, rush for televisions at a Target store in Chicago, while a shopper, below, pays cash for a Dell computer and some DVDs at a Best Buy store in Corpus Christi, Texas. Reuters

Certain Christmas seasons are memorable because of the sudden emergence of a product everyone has to have. A feeding frenzy erupts for Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, the Cabbage Patch Kid doll, or the Wii. This is not one of those seasons. There are products that are hot, and products that people will be more than happy to have as gifts. There are products that thrill particular demographic groups—videogames, for example—but there are no Christmas gifts that an entire society is yakking about. Not even those great-looking denim leg warmers from Macy's. You can walk from the top to the bottom of most major department stores without seeing anything you haven't seen before. Lots of cute little phones with cute little apps. More netbooks, more cellphones, more pocket video cameras that allow ordinary people to film ordinary events, more TVs. More personalized T-shirts, golf balls, bedroom slippers. But no amazing new product that sets an entire nation's heart aflutter. It just isn't going to be that kind of Christmas.

I for one would like to believe that the president's stimulus plan is already working, and that this will be reflected not only in the volume of gifts sold, but in the types of gifts sold. For example, I can think of one shovel-ready industry that might already be helping to lift this economy out of the mire. Surveillance. After all, that's what the $99.99 Swann PenCam DVR Mini Video Camera is for; why else would it have a pinhole video camera hidden away in the tip of a ball-point pen? And the "prestige" edition of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2," the hot new Xbox 360 game from Activision, actually comes equipped with night vision goggles, another superb surveillance device. To their numbers can be added the Bushnell Image View 8X30 2.1MP LCD Digital Camera Binocular (Amazon: $138.99), which allows you to film whatever you happen to be watching at the time, be it bald eagles mating or a coup d'état aborning in your neighbor's basement. Even more exciting is the Behome24/.Com Do-It-Yourself Residential Security Kit ($789.89), which enables you to view live video on your iPhone, Blackberry or Palm Pilot whenever somebody breaks into your home. This means that even while you are traveling you can keep tabs—in real time!—on the conscienceless individuals who are stealing your property. Of course, you could do the same thing by watching the Senate hearings on C-Span.

Yuletide is not without its enigmas. If the One-for-All URC 8910 Universal Remote Control, listed as one of the top Christmas gifts for men by, can actually control up to eight different devices, how does that make it different from the 85 other universal remote controls in my house that can supposedly control all my electronic devices but never do? If the One-for-All URC 8910 Universal Remote Control can actually do what it says it does, it could be the most important technological development since the invention of the printing press. I'm not kidding.

Electronic book readers are hot this year. But one niggling problem with the Kindle 2 and Barnes & Noble's Nook is that unless people creep up and peer over your shoulder, it's not obvious to them what you're reading. For years, I've noticed that people ostentatiously read books on public transportation in a deliberate attempt to edify others ("Outliers," "SuperFreakonomics," "The Black Swan"). But people also show off their reading material to annoy people. I have a friend who carries Glenn Beck's "Arguing with Idiots" everywhere he goes merely to enrage all the wistful types who still have Al Gore bumper stickers on their hybrids. He is not a nice man. And he'll never buy an ebook reader. It would spoil all the fun.

In any format, books like "Going Rogue" and "Arguing with Idiots" make controversial gifts. For obvious reasons, most gifts tend to non-partisan or bipartisan in nature. Christmas is the one time of year that Americans can set aside their differences and go out and buy gifts devoid of political content, like home brewing kits from Mr.Beer or those denim leg-warmers from Macy's or the Ex Voodoo knife set, consisting of five knives stored in the body of a stick man who is supposed to symbolize one's furloughed significant other ($69.95 from Still, I sometimes wonder if there are not Christmas gifts aimed at specific political groups, to the exclusion of everyone else. For example, we know that Republicans buy pick-up trucks and guns and that Democrats buy Alice Sebold novels and Macs and Endangered Species erasers (The Smithsonian catalog, $12). Not to mention that inexpensive line of "Mad Men" haberdashery that allows you to dress like a Republican, but at Democrat prices. But what do Independents buy? Or do Independents simply buy pickup trucks and Mac books before Christmas and then exchange them for Priuses and PC's after Christmas when the tectonic plates in their psyche have undergone yet another sudden shift?

My favorite gift for such politically meandering types is the Presidential Slogan coffee mug sold at Target. The inexpensive cup features snappy images of various famous chief executives, along with the slogans that made them famous, and includes everyone from the tax-slashing Ronald Reagan to the the thinking man's liberal Adlai Stevenson. It has a photo of Bill Clinton but it also has a slogan associated with Herbert Hoover. It is the perfect gift for fence-straddling Americans who veer to the left today and to the right tomorrow, people who have no coherent political philosophy, people who will apparently decide the outcome of every major election for the next few years.

Dead center in the middle of the FAO Schwarz toy store on Fifth Avenue sits a little clubhouse that has been rented by the Myachi company. The Myachi company makes sand-filled, palm-sized bean bags. The starter kit costs $6.95; more complex kits with an instructional DVD run $17.99. One day last week, I stood and watched rapt for about 10 minutes as a man flipped the bags in the air, demonstrating to mesmerized little kids what miracles could be wrought as long as the bags never landed on one's palms. The man was identified as Maverick, though one of his youthful assistants confided his suspicion that this might not be his real name. Those bags were something. You could land them on your forehead. You could pop them up onto your shoulder. You could seemingly make them disappear. The fun literally never stopped. At first it unnerved me that the most famous toy store in the entire world was renting out prime retail space at Christmas so that a guy named Maverick could hawk glorified bean bags on the main floor of its flagship Fifth Avenue store. But then I got to thinking about it. The Myachi bag experience is rooted in illusion, mirage and sleight of hand. It is a product whose price tag bears no real relationship to its actual worth. I think Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid might be giving out quite a few Myachi bags this Christmas.

When all is said and done, I suspect that this will be a modest, belt-tightening Christmas, but not a nightmarish one. If I were making my own list of gifts I would like, it would start and stop with that infrared sauna with MP3 hookup. There's something about listening to Velvet Revolver or The Chieftains in an inexpensive sauna that really thrills me. I hope that others feel the same way and splurge on lots of big-ticket merchandise. Getting those cash registers ringing is almost a patriotic duty, for as our enemies have learned, to their anguish, again and again, a nation prepared to kill is no match for a nation prepared to shop.

—Joe Queenan is a freelance writer in Tarrytown, N.Y. His memoir, "Closing Time," was published in April.