Snow covers the ground. Lights line the rooftops. Eight-foot blow-up figures are more common than pink flamingos on a 40th birthday. All tell-tale signs that the holiday season is nearing. But the most obvious signal that Christmas is just around the corner actually began weeks ago as our mailboxes became fuller and fuller with the arrival of catalogs and magazines.

I usually flip through every catalog which arrives at my house, just because there may be something in there I never new I needed. Not that I order anything. The catalog usually ends up in the recycling bin before I remember that I was thinking about ordering something. If nothing else, the catalogs provide hours of amusement, offering gift ideas you would have never thought of on your own.

How about the gifts which are advertised as Christmas gifts but which are about as far away from the holiday as can be?

Stuffed animals are a popular gift for children. Around the holidays, stuffed animals usually involve snowmen, bears and gingermen. But a holiday catalog has expanded that category this year by offering a new "holiday animal," the stuffed alligator.

Yep, takes me back to the days when I used to cuddle up with my pet alligator. Wait a minute, I never had a pet alligator at the holidays. For that matter, I never had a pet alligator -- ever.

And while I never had a pet bear or a pet gingerman, they certainly would have been higher up on my Christmas list than an alligator.

While some catalogs offer nearly everything under the sun, others offer one item and one item only. For example, we received a catalog devoted to pens -- 30 pages for one brand of pens.

Some people, including my husband, appreciate a fine pen. They like the weight, the grip, the fluid stroke. None of this means anything to me, especially at $60 to $70 a pop. I'm more of a pick-up-a-pen-somewhere-and-lose-it-by-the-end-of-the-day person. I don't want to spend a bunch of money on something I will likely "donate" to a friend or a business without realizing it.

You could rationalize that if I paid more money for the pen, I would keep track of its' whereabouts better. Not true. I just feel worse when I finally do loose it than if it had been a 10-for-$1 pen.

The same holds true with sunglasses. My household receives a catalog for sunglasses at least once a month -- approximately the same rate at which I "misplace" or "destroy via small hands" my sunglasses. Once again, I'm keeping the guilt-level low by not spending a lot of money on something I'll loose within a short time frame anyway.

And I refuse to spend vast amounts of money on sunglasses for anyone else, since I don't want to level that guilt on anyone else.

Sometimes you can use the catalogs to go to extremes. Another frequent catalog at my house is for bicycling. While you cold buy everything from helmets to seat covers, the most interesting part of the magazine is the sheer number of items contained in the 84 pages.

By flipping through the pages, you can literally build a bike from the ground up. I find it simply daunting. I had a hard enough time determining if I needed 18 or 21 speeds on my bike. To have to decide between the 14 cassettes just for 10-speeds seemed overwhelming. (Another plus for catalogs: I never knew the technical name for those cogs at the back of the bike until I received these catalogs.)

I'll just continue to purchase my bikes in one piece.

And if all else fails and you just can't think of that perfect gift for someone on your list, resort to the modern standby which requires more batteries than you used during your entire childhood, has an instruction manual thicker than most dictionaries and will be on it's way to being obsolete by the time it's unwrapped Christmas morning. In other words, buy something electronic.

-- In reality, Ronda Graff will likely not buy anything from these catalogs this Christmas season, but she still enjoys their arrival. They keep the kids occupied for hours.