Here’s the problem with most Christmas presents: you already have it or you don’t want it. And as soon as it’s open, you’ve already forgotten what it was. Worse if you’re the one giving the present, and you’ve just watched someone open three identical gifts, one of which was yours. Worse yet, when the ex-husband outspends you four-to-one on presents for your children.

Especially this year, throwing money around just seems wrong.

So here’s a proposal. Try coming up with Christmas and Hanukkah presents that pull people together instead of splitting them apart. That offer an experience instead of something to be dumped in the bottom of a closet, or regifted.

It takes some thinking (which is free!) and you have to know the person well. But here are some ideas for holiday gifts that keep on giving.

• The bored teenager who has everything (1)

You’ll never find the right clothes because what was in last month is now out. Electronics? You don’t even know what the kid has at this point (a lot). Instead, give an experience. For $100 you can give him or her a gift certificate for a flying lesson. Yes, in an airplane. I’ve had a great experience with Pilot Journey but you can also go to a local (ideally small) airport and just talk to an instructor. The astonishment, the worry, the preparation, the lesson itself will stretch out in memory. $100 is a lot of money, but this is a lot of experience. You only have one first flying lesson in your life. And the whole family can watch and take pictures with their cell phones.

• The bored teenager who has everything (2)

• The Good: How to Put the "Give" into Thanksgiving
•The Bad: Divorce Yourself from the Thanksgiving Blues
• The Ugly: How to Navigate Nosy Divorce Questions on Thanksgiving

Do you dread Turkey Day? Are you feeling crankful instead of thankful? Maybe you have an obligation to go to your in-laws, when you and your husband are fighting, and not sure you will make it to Christmas. Or perhaps you are suddenly single again, and don’t want to go alone to your parents’ or grandparents’ table, but don’t want to be alone either. What if people are coming to your house, and you just don’t have that Thanksgiving spirit: the economy, your work, your life — none of it seems good dinner table material.

And all that work putting together the meal. You’ve never felt so alone.

Luckily, there are strategies to get you through anything. What about that long drive with a husband that seems soon to be your ex. You have difficulty talking to each other, and now you are going to be in a car for a couple of hours. What do you do?

• First tactic: invite someone else along. It can be under the guise of “poor Emily, we don’t want her to spend Thanksgiving alone!” But at least there will now be another person in the car. You can’t be too uncivil to each other. And at least you’ll have someone to talk to.

• Second tactic: honesty. Make a pact with your husband … you will both put on a good face, and not bring everyone else down with sniping and griping. You will respect each other, and you will get your stories straight, whatever those stories are.

If you see an appealing ad on Craig’s List, or in the newspaper, or online, the first thing you should do is check the year, make and style of the car on www.kellybluebook.com. Kelly will immediately (for free) give you a range of prices, from a car in poor condition to one in excellent condition, for your specific area.

If the price seems reasonable, and if you are seriously interested it’s time to go see the car in person and do a walk around. That is, walk all the way around, and look down the length of the car. It’s best to do this in bright light, during the day. Are there ripples in the paint? If so, it may have been in an accident. Are there different color paints on the door and the frame or uneven gaps around the hood, doors, and trunk? Those too are signs it has had body work after an accident. Check inside the trunk: is the body color overlapping any rubber or plastic? Then it’s been repainted, and — say it with me now — you know it’s been in an accident.

Why shouldn’t you get a car that’s been in an accident? No. 1, airbags (see Part 1), and No. 2, the possibility of a bent frame, or serious cracks that can’t be repaired.

A Test Sit

Now, sit in the driver’s seat. Is it worn? Does it sag? Does it adjust to a height and angle that you find comfortable? Can you see easily over your left and right shoulders? If the car doesn’t feel right for you, it’s not right for you. Check the back seats too, if that's where family will be sitting. Can they see out? Can they have a conversation with someone in the front seat? Are the seatbelts readily accessible?

What You Can Check Yourself

When I split with my husband, I left him the Volvo, the apartment, the wall-to-wall carpeting, and the TV. That’s how badly I wanted out. Then I bought myself a used car, a junker with a gaping hole where the radio should have been. The glove box wouldn’t stay closed. The car sometimes stopped for no reason. Belts snapped, tires blew, engine heads were blown.

So I speak from experience when I tell you there are right ways and wrong ways for divorced women to buy a used car. Obviously if you and your husband have divided the six vintage cars in the garage, this doesn’t apply to you. But if you and he had one car, and he keeps it, and you need one... and if your credit is pretty much like everyone else’s, and if banks and car dealers are not making car loans... you may find yourself as a free agent, trying to pay cash for a car that will run, won’t break down, and especially won’t kill you.

For argument sake, I’ve chosen a budget of $5,000 to $6,000. At that price you are not likely to find a lot of cars at dealers showrooms (if you can find a dealer’s showroom, since they are all closing.)

Did I say “kill you” back there? Here’s a little known fact: some used cars have been in accidents where airbags have been deployed. And because airbags cost $1,000 or $2,000 or more to replace, sometimes the garage, sometimes the owner, just don’t replace them.

Then the car is put up for sale, “as is.”

So you may buy a car that is equipped with airbags — but instead of functioning airbags there are plastic packing peanuts, or Styrofoam cups, or a used airbag. Based on information from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, www.carbuyingtips.com, a friend who has worked at a dealership (he calls it a “stealership”) and a source who has bought and sold many cars, here is the FWW guide to buying a used car.

Anyone living north of the 36th latitude (Virginia) is going to have to deal with cold nights and big heating bills. I have to heat my house in the winter even in Miami, and folks in the desert Southwest have to pour on the heat for those nippy nights.

It would be handy to have a guy around to do all those handyman things, but if you’re going through divorce, and still living in the drafty family home, you’re going to have to do them yourself. And you can really save money this way.

An average American spends $1,300 on heating and cooling bills in a year. Those can be cut by 10 percent, 30 percent, 50 percent by tackling a few basics, like these recommended by the Department of Environmental Protection/Montgomery County, Maryland. Let’s start with drafts.

• We like this part: light some incense. Now walk around your house (ideally on a windy day), and see where the smoke blows away from the windows and doors. Don’t forget to check light switch plates, around the sink, and around light fixtures. Each of those places can have an air leak as well. And fixing these drafts is pretty easy. Grab a caulking gun from Home Depot, and go around the house, inside and out. Fill in all those loose places around windows and doors. And don’t forget to cut off drafts under doors, either with a rubber sweeper along the bottom or with a snakelike draft dodgers.

• Turn down the temperature on your hot water heater to 115 degrees. That should be hot enough for everything, and will be safer for your children. Anything hotter might scald them.

• Wear a sweater indoors, and buy the kids cool nice hoodies. Don’t forget to put on a pair of socks too, or slippers. Now, turn the thermostat down to 68 degrees. Get a programmable thermostat that will drop the temperature to 65 at night. And when you’re away from the house, 55 degrees is fine.

In all the kerfuffle over the big $700 billion bail out, you may not have noticed that the House of Representatives passed a bill that may be more important to you and your pocket book. We’re talking about HR 5244, a bill of rights for people who use credit cards.

The bill, which now moves to the Senate, would block a lot of those pesky, sneaky things that credit card companies do to jack up your interest rate, or charge you late fees, or slip credit cards into the hands of your college-age children.

And to prove there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing, the Federal Reserve has also introduced a reform bill to deal with consumer rights. It may take a federal scholar to winkle out the differences between these bills, but it is reassuring that the banking industry is against the Federal Reserve bill, calling it, “an unprecedented regulatory intrusion into marketplace pricing and product offerings.” And the credit card industry is against the House and Senate bills.

Basically, if banks and credit card companies are against such moves, regular people should assume they are for them.

Meanwhile, you should protect yourself. As you read your credit card bills, beware of the following terms, listed by Credit Card Reform:

• Universal default The term means is that a credit card company may monitor your credit report and increase your interest rate if they think your credit score is declining, or you are making a big ticket purchase, like a car. This can happen even if you pay their credit card on time.

As of 2002, only seven states had extended child support to age 21 or beyond. In most others, court-ordered support ends when a child is 18 or finishes high school. Not surprisingly, analysis at Cornell University of a study of 27,000 high school students in the 80s and 90s showed that children of divorce were 40 percent less likely to apply to a selective college, and half as likely to attend.

It’s not just the lack of financial support, it is also the physical and emotional disruption that stalls some kids in their academic careers. Some see their grades fall, and never get back on the academic track. Others drift away from school, sports, and authority figures.

So, especially if you are a single mom, in this season when prep classes begins for SAT and ACT tests, when you are planning to haul your high school junior around the country to visit four-year colleges, when the college applications are filing your child’s inbox, and application fees are waiting to be paid, stop.

Although most parents would have a hard time admitting it – I did – not every child belongs in college. And a lot of kids should not go to college straight out of high school.

Putting yourself in the poor house trying to earn or borrow enough to send him or her to college is not a sound investment in your own future.

The average cost of a four-year college education at a public university or college right now is $75,000, including tuition, books, fees, room and board, and travel to school, but not including spring break, the new laptop, and a cute winter jacket. At a private institution, it’s $152,000.

Think you have a few years ahead of you to save that up? If your child starts college in the fall of 2016, the average cost of a public college four-year education will be $116,000, and a private college education, $237,000.

That’s a whole lot of spaghetti dinners for the next eight years. And no nights out.

Here is one argument about what causes the pay gap between men and women. Men do what they have to do, even if the job is dirty, even if the work is hard, even if it means missing their son’s school play. Women choose cleaner jobs in a more pleasant environment, jobs that don’t require as much physical labor, and make room in their schedules for their son’s school play.

Therefore, women earn less.

“Women and men make 25 different work-life decisions,” says Dr. Warren Farrell, the author of “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth About the Wage Gap, and What Women Can Do About it”.

“Each of those decisions leads to men earning more money and women leading a more balanced life.”

That is not a bad thing, he says. Since a balanced life, and time for family and friends, is worth more than high pay, “men have more to learn from women than women from men.”

That is, unless you are divorced, and have to support a family on one salary – yours!

In that case, Farrell has tips for FWW on traveling what he calls the “toll road” to better pay.

One goal for a divorced woman with children, he said, is keeping your ex in the picture. “The more he’s involved, up to 50 percent, the better the children do, academically, socially, in terms of physical health, educationally,” Farrell says.

If the father shares child rearing 50 percent, that will free a woman to be more active in the workplace. And, he says, “men who are involved with their children are 92 percent more likely to pay their child support.”

The divorce is over, and you are on your own. You have a lot of big decisions to make, but the one about car insurance should be easy, with the following tips from consumer-finance expert Ethan Ewing.

In fact, it begins when you buy a car.

• Plan your purchase. You will save right out of the gate if you opt for a car without a lot of bells and whistles. Turbo features, for instance, often raise premiums because insurers think that, if you choose turbo, you are more likely to speed. And look up which cars have the highest theft rates – generally speaking, the imports like Honda Accord, Honda Civic, Toyota Camry, Nissan Sentra, the Toyota pickup, and some domestic makes like the Dodge Caravan, Ford F150 Series, Saturn SL and the Dodge Ram pickup. Out West and down South, full-size pickups are often the most vulnerable. If a car is likely to be stolen, it will often cost more to insure.

• If you live in a city, compare the cost and convenience of parking in a garage to what you will pay extra in theft insurance if you park on the street.

• Pay bills on time and pay overdue debts. Insurers take credit scores into account when determining rates. You can raise your score as much as 20 points in a month just by paying on time.

• Determine liability coverage: Basic liability covers damage to property or injury to other people as well as court costs. Each state has minimums. Liability coverage is expressed in three numbers, generally noted in thousands of dollars. The first is liability for one person hurt in an accident. The second is a maximum for all injuries in one accident: you, your children, their friends. The third covers property damage. So, 25/50/15 covers $25,000 for one person's injuries; $50,000 for all injuries; and $15,000 in property damage.

• Determine collision coverage, which insures a vehicle against damage from an accident.