How to Play the Harmonica: and Other Life Lessons, by Sam Barry; Foreword by Dave Barry by Sam Barry

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At the end of the last Daily Sam, which featured absurdly expensive gift ideas, I promised that I would follow with gift ideas for people you hate. Using the top-secret research method of Google search, I quickly learned that this idea is not so original. In fact, not only is it not original—I am frankly a little worried about the frame of mind of the rest of humanity. (I know I’m okay.) Here are the headings of some of the sites I encountered searching for “gifts for people you hate.”

Willamette Week’s Holiday Gift Guide. This is really a very thoughtful list. This is the one to use when shopping for your grandmother.

Ticket Liquidator—a name you can trust when it comes to gift giving—offers a Top Ten Gifts for People You Hate. You shouldn’t go to this site—it’s pretty tasteless. Oh, so now you’re going to go. Real mature.

Five games to buy for people you hate. Actually, I think elf bowling looks like fun. But don’t get it for me. I’m not kidding. Don’t.

There are other sites with the perfect gift for that special someone, if that special someone is a little "different." Kritters in the Mailbox offers spider gifts and merchandise. Nothing says Christmas, Hanukah, or Kwanza quite like spiders.

And of course there is Dave Barry’s classic annual gift guide, which comes out every year, generally speaking. The great thing about this guide is that it makes shopping for my brother so easy!

Of course all of these guides have been created and compiled by actual living human beings. They are labors of love, or hate, by people who have a real passion for the ridiculous, or spiders. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw that the faceless corporate giant, Amazon.com, had also created a guide listing books to buy for people you hate. They think of everything there in the Amazon silo underneath Cheyenne Mountain! Leading off the list is Principia Mathematica to *56 by Alfred North Whitehead (not to be confused with Alfred White Northhead). Third on the list is a book we publish at HarperOne, Being and Time by Rupert Murdoch. (I kid of course—Being and Time is by Herman Melville.)

I didn’t think the Amazon list was nearly as funny as the other gift guides I’ve mentioned. For one thing, I like some of the books they list there. For instance, I’ve read Being and Time nineteen times in a row, and I plan to continue reading it until they give me a raise.

I hope this list of gift guides for people you hate has been helpful. I am trying to do my part to generate holiday cheer. My next guide will be on gifts you can buy that are really, really cheap, because that is what the holiday spirit is all about.