Gift guide

It’s time once again to help you find just the right gifts for those hard-to-please friends and relatives. (You can check out past year guides here, here, here and here.)

Let’s get right to it. 

Gun-toting garden gnomes. Your paranoid friends and relatives will get protection from enemy kobolds and orcs with these properly armed gnomes. This is how you show you’re serious about protecting your garden.

You can also hang these guys on Christmas trees to frighten small children

The Original Tinned Fish Candle. What better way to brighten up a room than with sardine-shaped candles fresh from a can? These candles are the perfect accompaniment for a fishing-village themed event, or they can be something to blame for the odor in your house.

Vengeance is yours! Who doesn’t want vengeance? For a mere base price of $285,000, you can purchase a vehicle that will both protect you from your enemies and intimidate them. A “military package” for those of you battling serious villains includes bulletproof glass, vests, helmets and body armor along with a convenient pepper spray dispenser if a foe is able to get through the armor and invade your space.

You can also get rid of tails with smoke and blinding lights.

Tights and capes are not included.

A snail headband. This is the ideal gift for friends who are tired of the fast pace of modern life. Not only can they signal their disdain for the daily grind, but they can look darn cute doing it.

The cloth band includes a pair of antennae with eyes that can stare into the souls of onlookers.

The “frequently bought together” section for the snail headband on Amazon includes car cleaning gel and a squirrel finger puppet set. This is a purchaser demographic that cries out for research.

Scent of a library. You can smell just like a library with Bibliotheque perfume. This is the perfect gift for the person who misses long hours in library stacks or the student who wants you to think they’ve been studying.

“One spray is enough to bathe the neck in the atmosphere of a world suspended in time. A world of old books, the scent of leather-bound pages arranged on dark wood shelves.”

There’s a scholarly romance novel in the making here.

Generic Knowles. Nothing says Beyonce like a plain gray sweatshirt. Really. Nothing does.

For just $95 you can purchase a gray sweatshirt inscribed with “B. Knowles” in plain black letters.

This could stand for Beyonce Knowles. Or Butch Knowles. Or Beulah Knowles.

Who knows? It’s the air of mystery you’re buying here.

Generic Swift. See above.

A President James Buchanan throw blanket. Just the thing for loved ones who have fantasized about sleeping with the 15th president of the United States. Even if they haven’t considered a Buchanan tryst, this blanket is perfect for anyone with intimacy problems who needs something to talk about in the bedroom.

The seller, on their web page, notes that Buchanan is “often criticized for his inaction in the fact of the growing tensions between North and South that ultimately led to the Civil War.”

If that doesn’t sell you on the product, nothing will.

Pants that light up when music plays. Not only will your gift recipient be the life of the party, but so will their pants.

For a marked-down price of $449.95, you get pants that can be controlled by an app that controls colors and pulse modes and can sync the light show to music.

You’ll also be less likely to be hit by cars.