When I go Christmas shopping, I have no time to be creative. With my schedule, I simply make a trip or two, grab as much as I can and hope for the best.

My sister-in-law, however, has got to be the most imaginative shopper I know.

Marlene has had my name for Christmas for the past two years, and in each of them has grilled me for an extensive list of ideas and studied it thoroughly.

Last year, I told her that I liked giraffes, nature, hiking and the outdoors. She gave me giraffe earrings, a "sounds of nature" tape and a framed picture of a sunset view from the hiking trails at Lake Kabetogama, where we went on a big family camping trip several years ago. The picture sits on the ledge beside my desk at work — it’s nice to look at when the view though the window is of snow flurries.

This Christmas, I told her that my favorite painting was "Starry Night" by Vincent Van Gogh, I’d wanted an inflatable bath pillow for years, and the only Dean Koontz book I hadn’t read was one that had a woman and a boy on the cover.

When I opened my gifts from her on Christmas Day, I found a print of "Starry Night," along with a bath ensemble of brushes, loofas, files and that bath pillow I’d always wanted, a container of those little round bath oil balls, and the Dean Koontz book.

Planning a nice, long bath that night when I got home, I quickly cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, filled the tub, added a bath-oil ball and some of my daughter’s new bubble bath. My kids had given me a new, fluffy bath towel and washcloth, so those were part of the setup as well. I set peach candles on the bathroom counter, grabbed my bottle of Mountain Dew and settled down into the steamy water with my book, laying my head on that wonderfully soft pillow.

I’ve been known to read an entire book in the bathtub, but this time I only got 66 pages out of the way in an hour and a half (I spent 20 minutes with all those brushes and loofas). I had recently purchased a CD called "The Blue Danube and Other Waltzes," so I listened to that on our portable disc player. The next CD in the player was my husband’s copy of Pink Floyd’s "Dark Side of the Moon," which blended surprisingly quite well with the classical music.

A long soak in the tub is a luxury for me, so I’m still waiting to use all my neat stuff again. Showers are quick and efficient, but they don’t come close to the feeling of total indulgence you get when you drop everything and head for the bathtub.

I really appreciate the effort my sister-in-law went to do something that she knew would make me happy for Christmas (she said she had to go to four or five places before she found the right book). She could have bought me something boring and practical, but she specifically searched for gifts that would fit my interests rather than my needs. I like that.

What did I get her? Something practical, I’m afraid, but I couldn’t help it. The only thing on her list was a bathrobe, so that’s what she got. Two of them, in fact, and she’s keeping the one she got from her daughter and exchanging mine.

My husband (her brother) and her husband had each other’s names as well, and I think they were probably happy with their gifts — they gave each other exactly the same thing, nice hardcover books on whitetail deer.

I wish I had the time, energy and imagination to be as creative as Marlene, because watching someone open a gift they love is as fun as opening your own gifts. Maybe I’ll add that goal to my ever-growing list I make every year in my head that I never accomplish. If good intentions were reality, I’d be shopping for the holidays in August, have a hundred Christmas cards mailed every year by Dec. 1, have cookie jars and Tupperware containers filled with homemade goodies by Dec. 15, and have the exterior of my house aglow with lights. Of course, I’d also have an immaculate house, a flourishing career as a best-selling novelist, kids as polite as Ozzie and Harriet’s boys, and a body like Linda Hamilton’s in Terminator II. I might even have a clean desk at work, but let’s not push things.