Well, here it is the middle of November and I am making out my Christmas shopping list. Imagine that! I don’t usually do it until Dec. 23.

In the good old days (we senior citizens like to talk about the good old days as if there were no bad old days), the Christmas season didn’t start until after Thanksgiving. Today I am seeing Christmas wreaths on the doors of houses, high tech shoot ‘em up toys for the kids in stores and commercials about movies that seem to forget that there were The Ten Commandments.

Wasn’t it just yesterday, I think, that we celebrated the Fourth of July?

So here I am in front of my computer trying to translate into its mysterious world a list of what kinds of gifts I should give to my family, my friends and some who are not exactly my friends, but don’t fall into the enemy category. At Christmas, I suppose, it is the correct Christian spirit for no one to have enemies.

The easiest way, of course, is to give everybody money. It lightens Santa’s sack and saves you the bruises that come from those department store shoppers who crash into you while trying to beat other shoppers to a counter where there is only one salesperson trying to accommodate what seems like 50 buyers.

But it is so unimaginative to give money as a present. Lucrative for the recipient, especially if he or she is a teenager, but not very creative or thoughtful for the giver. Concealing a $50 bill in Christmas wrapping paper does not seem so Yule-like as if it were a sweater or even a pair of socks. Well, maybe if it’s a one thousand dollar bill, but that requires an extraordinary commitment to the saying that it is better to give than to receive.

Finally, as I struggle with a solution, I decide to give everybody the knowledge of life. It is called books. There is a problem, however. No one, even the best of college graduates, reads books. One man told me he hasn’t read a book in three years. Another said he doesn’t have time for reading books. I reply that I set aside a half an hour at bedtime each night to do some reading. Then I realize he is much younger than I and he and his wife have other priorities at bedtime. But I tell him once a week for reading doesn’t really seem to be too demanding even on his schedule. Maybe his wife will want to read, too. After all, they must have time to improve their minds in addition to their bodies.

The gifts of books do not need to be on the best seller lists, I decide. I have recently read some very good books, one about Andrew Jackson, the early president-general who visited Cape May. At the recent successful Wildwood Weekend With Woodrow Wilson, sponsored by the Friends of the J. Thompson Baker House of the Wildwood Civic Club, I was given a first edition copy of the book, “Woodrow Wilson, His Life and Work,” written by William Dunseath Eaton and Harry C.Read, the first the former editor of the Chicago Herald, and the second a war correspondent for the Chicago Journal. It was published in 1919, seven years after Wilson was elected president soon after he slept in Wildwood during a campaign trip. I look forward to reading this as a furtherance of my limited knowledge of life.

My shopping list is not complete, but books will be on it. Perhaps it will change the bedtime schedule of my friends at least once a week. I hope I will not become their enemy.