The six pounds of advertising inserts in the morning newspaper on Thanksgiving Day sent a clear message: Ready or not, the official start of the Christmas shopping season is at hand.

Enjoy your turkey and the candied yam concoction that Aunt Martha brought to the table, if you must. But be forewarned that tomorrow morning we get serious about the real game plan here, which, simply put, is to separate as many of us from as much of our cash as possible in the 30 shopping days remaining until Christmas.

Thursday’s glut of glitzy advertising fliers – a newspaper carrier’s worst nightmare come true, but a shopaholic’s delight – was a welcome diversion on the traditional day of government-sanctioned indulgence and indolence. The colorful array of promotional material promised everything from bargains worthy of 5 a.m. store openings, to free gift certificates to the first 25 shoppers busting down the front door, to “seven-hour specials” that only a dope would pass up.

Free $20 bonus cards with every 100-dollar purchase. Buy one gizmo, get two free. Thirty percent off. Forty percent off. Sixty percent off. Limited time only. Some assembly required. Shop early for best selection. Regular prices may vary by store. Sorry, no rain checks.

The advertising fliers are interesting to peruse on a slow holiday, always a welcome antidote to the insipid three-hour television infomercial that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and others of its ilk have become. I do not pretend to speak for you, but if it comes to a Thanksgiving morning choice of watching egotistical network “personalities” feign enthusiasm for the job of parade host/network show promoter or sticking my nose in a Home Depot advertising supplement promoting the latest shipment of must-have big-boy toys, the flier will win every time.

Still, peruse though I may, I seldom have the good fortune to find a timely suggestion for that perfect gift for the person on the list who is impossible to buy for, he or she already in possession of most anything an uninspired imagination might picture.

You know the drill: Each Christmas we promise ourselves that, having had an entire year to plan, come next December we will surely have found a gift that stops the hard-to-buy-for contingent dead in its tracks. Each year we fail spectacularly.

Enter the late great humorist, James Thurber, to possibly save the day.

In a collection of his pieces included in my dawg-eared copy of “Thurber Country,” published a half-century ago by Simon and Schuster, Thurber wrote about the complications that ensued when he bought his wife a humongous American flag attached to an 18-foot flagpole as a Christmas gift.

My intended victims already have one of those, of course. But Thurber made other gift suggestions for milady, including household articles “ingenuously designed to keep males, whether hosts or guests, well in hand at parties…”.

One was a cocktail tray to which a half-dozen glasses are cunningly secured by tiny bolts. After the third round of drinks, the glasses are filled with highballs and passed “only to those gentlemen who are clearly on the point of starting trouble or `making something out of it,”‘ Thurber advised.

“The difficult host or guest will try to pick up the glass, as before, only to find that he can’t get it off the tray,” he continued. “This gives the drinker the feeling that he has lost his mind or his strength, and is likely to sober him up for the rest of the evening…”

The second item – a “perfectly heavenly blackjack made of Spanish leather with a beautifully engraved silver handle” – seemed a more practical gift, a bonus being that the shop owner would drop buy to show the hostess how to use the blackjack without letting the guests find out what is going on.

“When the tipsy host sneaks out to the kitchen for a double whiskey and soda on the side, his wife simply steps from behind something and hits him back of the right ear,” Thurber explained. “If she can’t drag him into his bedroom by herself, the chances are that one of her women friends will be glad to help…”

That should pretty much take care of your Christmas shopping for the lady on your list who has everything except a neat substitute for the less-subtle oaken billy club she keeps stashed in the pantry for such occasions.

Alas, since Thurber does not tell us what we might purchase to place under the tree for the male of the species, we are left to our own devices to miserably botch that transaction. Again.

Columnist Kent Ward’s e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.