This photo contains SPOILERS for some of our relatives, but they never visit this site. Lucky me!

I don’t know if your local strip malls have Bath & Body Works stores, but ’round these parts they’re the uncontested champions of creating and marketing soaps, shampoo, shower gels, lotions, sprays, and other assorted cleansing liquids in imaginative flavors, scents, or made-up poetic themes. You can’t buy just one B&BW item in a given kind such as Juniper Breeze, Country Apple, Twilight Woods, Midnight Pomegranate, Dancing Waters, or Warm Vanilla Sugar. You have to collect the entire set or else your bathroom cabinet contents won’t match and all your showers and baths will go horribly wrong. Other customers can just tell, and their concerned glares will heap shame upon you and your failure to treat hygiene as pretty-smelling Serious Business.

The women in my wife’s family love, love, love their B&BW products. Every one of them has a favorite flavor or scent from the vast catalog of personal cleansing products. Amazingly, my wife has memorized the favorites of every single relative so she’ll know exactly which stocking stuffers to buy. I’ve never once seen her swap their gels by accident, nor vice versa. Somehow they all have a system and it works for them. This sort of thing doesn’t have to be divided among gender lines, but my son, my brothers-in-law, my nephews, and I are united in our befuddlement while this part of the annual gift exchange goes on. We figure as long as we’re clean, or at least clean-ish, we’re good to go.

Right this way for your last, best, most desperate holiday gift-giving guide!