Well, it’s January. You know what that means: All that money you spent on Christmas was, officially, a waste yet again. That sweater you picked out is buried in some loved one’s closet. Those toys you got your kids are shoved under the bed. Or broken. Or, if your kids are old enough (which isn’t as old as you think) traded for either sex, drugs, or both, depending on their predilections.

So, in January, I say we celebrate one of the great truisms of life: ’Tis better to give than to receive (unless we’re talking oral sex). See, when you give a gift, you’re welcome to labor under the mistaken belief that it was a good gift. When you receive it, you know full well it wasn’t.

This has always been a problem. Sure, there are exceptions. For instance, most wives generally consider most gifts involving diamonds to be good gifts. It’s one of those unwritten rules of marriage. (My wife, interestingly enough, is an exception – but I digress.) So, you can generally tell whether you’re giving her a good gift based on carat weight, which is convenient, if costly.

With kids, you sometimes can benefit from that source of parental salvation: the wish list. For you single people, it’s kinda like a wedding registry but for your offspring. Whom, by the way, you should not marry. But, again, I digress.

Even with a wish list, you can sometimes fire blanks. Maybe you misunderstood an entry and bought one of those “trap” gifts the stores love to stock. You know, your Far-Real Pets, or your Lettuce Field Children. Any robot that changes into a car that doesn’t have an Autobot or Decepticon icon on its chest. Those traps.

What’s more, sometimes the entries can be a disappointment. Kids can’t be blamed for falling for good advertising: Kids are stupid. Even more stupid than we adults. And we adults fall for ads all the damn time.

Little surprise, then, that my son desperately wanted (and got) that goofy, full-sized Bumblebee Transformer for Christmas last year, which, as it turns out, takes approximately one hour, two people, and an online video to switch from car to robot or back again. Which is why, once you realize this, you’ll want to put it into robot mode, apply superglue, and inform your four-year-old, “Sorry, Steve, but apparently this Bumblebee doesn’t transform. He’s a robot-only Transformer. It’s a new thing they’re trying out.”

You clearly don’t want him stuck in car mode: Car toys are far cheaper than robot toys. Ergo, if you must choose between the two (and trust me, you must), you go with robot mode every time.

Anyhow, point is, that toy’s a bit of a disappointment, and yet it’s precisely what the kid wanted, right off the top of his list. So even when the recipient tells you what to get him, you’re still taking a gamble.

Which is how we got here. To January. And all those unwanted gifts, which the credit card company still expects me to now pay for.

Me, I love Christmas. But I just know you hate what I bought you. Which is why I think it’d be only fair if you sent a note to MasterCard and asked them to waive that particular charge.

I would suggest we stick to gifts everyone likes, such as oral sex, but that’d be awkward with and/or for a lot of you. And don’t you dare suggest gift cards. They’re just like cash, except you leave them in your junk drawer until they expire, or you lose them in the center console of your car.

Good news is it’s January. So we don’t have to go through this whole thing for an entire year. And with any luck, we’ll make it to February and all its Mardi Gras goodness. Or is that in March this year? Or maybe April?

I never can understand the Catholic calendar. It seems like every year I see my Catholic friends walking around with dirty foreheads and have to reset my celestial reckoning. But maybe that’s just me. And it doesn’t have much to do with Christmas at all. I mean, aside from the whole Jesus thing, that is.