Christmas Day will arrive in a week and a half. The shelves have been depleted of all the “good stuff” because stores are having sales to make room for Valentine’s Day cards and candies. If there are any names left on your list for which you need to buy, they’re most likely the names of men.

Around the holidays, I am glad I’m a man married to a woman who appreciates any gift purchased from Victoria’s Secret or Bed, Bath and Beyond. If it’s lacy, smells of a well-kept English garden and is not an apparatus used to suck up crumbs from the kitchen floor, she will probably be pleased with the gift. On the other hand, the choices of gifts for men are limited and I wouldn’t suggest a frilly nightgown, or a lavender-scented drawer liner or apricot bath beads for the man in your life unless, of course, he is a man who scrapbooks and wears a bit too much purple.

I have received many wonderful gifts in my time, but I knew I had become a real man not when I dated a cheerleader for the first time, but when I received Old Spice cologne in my stocking. I received it in my late teens, and at 48 years of age I am still using that same bottle of Old Spice. Fathers have a difficult time telling their sons and daughters that one bottle of this masculine nectar will last the average man five years.

Children continue to wrap a box of it each Christmas, give it to their daddy; he says something nice like “Gosh, thanks kids. I was almost out” and then stores it in the garage with the other nine bottles. And what happens to all this aromatic concoction?

I have no idea what my father did with the 14 bottles my sister and I gave him. Personally, when our beagle Max was sprayed by a skunk in the middle of the night, I told the family that I had something in the garage that might take care of the odor. It was a miracle. I’m not going to come right out and say what it was that I mixed together with five gallons of water in a washtub, but Max no longer barked; he started wearing a sailor’s cap and whistling the theme from the Old Spice commercial.

As another gift-giving suggestion, tools are a good option. On Christmas morning, a man’s eyes will light up like a little boy discovering a BB gun under the tree as he unwraps a Craftsman wrench, ratchet or hammer. These gifts are practical and easy to find at your local hardware store. Whether you are a professional or a weekend handyman, getting tools each Christmas is a good idea since you’ll most likely lose your new gifts in the snow a few days after the New Year when you are using them to pound, twist, bang and pull the red and green tree stand from the base of your dried up cedar, fir or pine.

Men seem to get a lot of socks around the holidays. Socks are good gifts because we guys don’t really know how to properly put them on and take them off so we wear them out quickly. Women calmly and carefully gather their sock from the top to the toe, slip their pedicured toes into them and slowly work them up to the top of their ankle without stretching a stitch.

On the other hand, men take no measures to increase the longevity of a sock. A sock is a sock. Its purpose is to keep the Redwing work boot from wearing calluses on your heel and keep your feet warm when you’re tending to livestock or sitting in a deer stand at 5:30 in the morning. Give a man a pair of socks and in a week’s time, he’ll have stretched them to the point of having to buy a new pair but in the process he will gain two stocking caps.

Ties are another good Christmas gift for men because we hate buying them about as much as we hate wearing them. Who on earth decided it would be a great fashion statement to wear a long, tailored piece of cloth around your neck to church, weddings, the office and cocktail parties? If the tie’s inventor is still alive, I’d enjoy slowly choking him with his grand invention. One more thing. Why is it that a piece of clothing that is made of no more than three handkerchiefs worth of fabric costs more than a pair of Haggar slacks? Boggles the mind.

In all reality, the way to a man’s holiday heart is through his stomach. I personally enjoy those decadent gift packages of assorted cheeses, salamis and spreads from Hickory Farms. A tin of Danish butter cookies from the Dollar General is also a staple good around this time of the year. So are chocolate covered cherries, fruitcake, Whitman Samplers and Christmas cookies in the shapes of Santas, reindeer and partially winged angels. Of course after devouring this array of foods, which are banned by every exercise guru on earth, one can kiss those Arrow shirts from your mother-in-law with the 16-inch neckline goodbye.

So ladies, don’t worry. There are lots of things left in the stores that would be appropriate to buy for the man in your life. And how will you know you got him the perfect gifts? Well, after the wrapping and ribbons have been discarded and the kids are playing with their newest electronic brain candy, if your man is standing in front of the tree wearing a stiff Arrow shirt accented by a noose of a tie, his feet are swelling as the new socks cut off the blood flow to his feet, he is holding his new wrench, ratchet and hammer in one hand while his other hand strokes his stomach which is aching from eating too many varieties of cheese from a Hickory Farms assorted pack, and the smell of Old Spice hangs like fog in the room, you can rest assured that you have given him a Christmas morning he will not soon forget.