Outdoors | What’s a good Christmas gift for a fisherman? Hints from holiday catalogs

It’s mid-December and time for an evening walk to the mailbox.

The gloom of a foggy winter night is brightened with colorful holiday lights. While our corgi noses fallen leaves for a loose morsel, I empty a letter drop stuffed with catalogs, bills, and requests for donations.

Doesn’t anyone send Christmas cards anymore? But then again, why buy a sheet of 73-cent postage stamps when you can shotgun 2,000 “friends” for free on Facebook. Bah, humbug!

As for gift catalogs, I keep a ready supply on hand. I thumb through them, highlight interesting products, and shop from the comfort of a favorite easy chair.

A grand total of 52 different catalogs arrived this year. It should come as no surprise to find that, among this seasonal glut of printed media, my favorites relate to angling.

Free shipping and discount codes with a minimum purchase caught my attention this year. Often times, gifts for a family member or a friend cost less than the designated amount, a dictum that led to me to consider the purchase of an inexpensive item for myself.

To take advantage of the bonus. As an afterthought, mind you. Never as a central imperative.

A corollary to my thinking was that Nancy and I find shopping for each other difficult.

We’ve reached the point in our lives when, if we badly want an item, we buy it for ourselves.

Earlier this year, I told her that my new truck could count for our respective anniversary presents.

Nancy didn’t go for it. “I want an emerald necklace,” she countered. Albeit, a fair trade because I opted to let her pick out a setting she preferred.

Shopping for myself at Christmas this year turned out easier than picking “just the right” gift for others. The idea was a modest follow-on purchase would save Nancy the trouble of fretting over a gift for me.

What came up roses after I ordered a sling pack for a grandson was an inexpensive pair of nippers. Nippers are to fly fishers what a quality pair of sewing scissors is to a seamstress.

Nippers suspend from the front of my trout fly vest, but I rely on a pocket knife tucked deep in a pants pocket to trim leader material when I fish for steelhead. The new tungsten carbide “FishSkin” nippers will soon hang within comfortable reach when I swing flies on the Hanford Reach.

What covers your skull is a personal choice. Winter headgear must be comfortable, protect from the elements, and improve your appearance.

After a few years of use, wool stocking caps creep up on my pointy head (I wrote a story about that once).

Both felt caps in my arsenal of much-loved headgear are badly frayed. In a soon-to-arrive package, along with the colorful flannel shirt ordered for a granddaughter from LL Bean, will be a modest-priced knit cap for myself. Watch out winter walleye!

After 53 years of charitable matrimony, Nancy recently declared, “I’m tired of being responsible for every meal.” Hence, shifting culinary duties my direction.

Instead of opting for a zippered man apron, I selected a $7 “Reel Good Cook” pot holder from a homeware catalog that put me over the minimum $50 order. I hope Nancy wraps it up nicely.

I’ve advised our children to not buy me a flannel shirt because no less than two dozen vintage versions hang in my closet to be donned on a rotating basis.

Flannel shirts improve with age, as I like to think I do. The same notion goes for any gift wrapping that contains fishing tackle. I don’t need it. If anything, I should make up festive packages with angling gear I will likely never use.

Holiday sweets are always a welcome surprise though. Feel free to gift me fudge, peanut brittle, Almond Roca, chocolate covered expresso beans, almonds dipped in dark chocolate, candied popcorn, frosted cookies, or caramels (No sea salt as I prefer to enjoy caramels like my whiskey—straight up).

You get the idea. Sugar never fails to fuel this well-outfitted angler (and newly-ordained chef) for one more last cast on his favorite stream.