Christmas gift ideas: get what Jesus got

If you’re in the busi­ness of giv­ing presents at Christ­mas, then you sure as hell bet­ter start now.

(Yes, I did think about whether it was wrong to put hell and Christ­mas in the same sen­tence, but is just a fig­ure o’ speech, yeronner!)

You might take the path most beaten and take the top box off the Christ­mas spe­cials stack at a depart­ment store and then line up for the gift-wrapping ser­vice, all the while won­der­ing how come they don’t save everyone’s time and gift wrap every­thing first.

Or, you could fol­low the star that led the three wise men (or kings, depend­ing on which DVD zone you bought your story from) to stop by the per­fumeries and jew­el­ers on their way to the lit­tle manger.

The good news is you don’t have to travel to the Holy Land for that.

Because this is Sin­ga­pore, and Sin­ga­pore being the cross­roads or East and West and all that, you can pur­chase a bit of the three things these wise men three gave as gifts to the baby Jesus.

Well, just gold and frank­in­cense. I didn’t see myrrh any­where in the Arab Street area (where we returned for more ribbons).

It was the first time I had seen frank­in­cense. In resin form, it looks a bit like rock sugar, but has the most pow­er­ful fra­grance ever.

I sup­pose liv­ing in the desert and all that, you’d need pow­er­ful per­fumes to mask the smell of camels and not enough water to bathe.

So, Jamal Kazura Aro­mat­ics on Bagh­dad Street sells jars of Omani frank­in­cense resin for $15–18, so you’d be quite the wise man to buy one as a prezzie for a friend.

I asked the sales­man — who’ll whip you up your own sig­na­ture fra­grance from the dozens of alcohol-free scents on dis­play after ask­ing you a dozen ques­tions (do you smell like camel?) — what one was to do with the resin if one were so inclined to buy a jar.

The sales­man very kindly demon­strated how to burn the resin, as one would burn the stuff they smoke in a shisha — with charcoal.

Cute. But I wasn’t too con­vinced about get­ting an entire jar until he told me that this fra­grance could be had on the go — you can burn the resin as you would in a char­coal incense burner, only in a spe­cial, purpose-made 12v car socket incense burner.

Now you can get rid of camel odor in your car while you bear gifts and tra­verse afar.