These tidings are brought to you by "Why It Is So Hard to Predict Our Partner's Product Preferences: The Effect of Target Familiarity on Prediction Accuracy," in the December issue of the scholarly Journal of Consumer Research, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Meredith Melcher, 26, of Washington, talks about the time her father gave her mother ski goggles for Christmas. Her mother was six months pregnant. She didn't ski even when she wasn't pregnant. They fit him much better than her. They were really nice ski goggles, though, Melcher says.

Davy Lerouge is not surprised. The assistant professor of marketing at Tilburg University in the Netherlands is the co-author of the "So Hard" monograph that comes with 13 charts, a raft of equations and 28 references.

The situation, he says, is basically this:

Not so much, reports Debbie Linni, of Silver Spring, Md.

How about a hockey puck for Christmas? That's what she once got from a boyfriend. She was supposed to be impressed because the puck had been used by the New Haven Nighthawks, the defunct farm team. But somehow, that's not why she remembers it.

"Women don't want to have to tell what they want," Linni says. They want their lover to peer into their soul and respond with deep empathy.

But you have to be clear and explicit, she has learned, "Otherwise, you get a hockey puck."

When you start collecting tales of mind-crushing holiday gift insensitivity, it's striking how often the story ends with "I married him anyway" or "We've been married now for 37 years."

George Clark, 59, of Washington, will never live down the Christmas vacuum cleaner. "It still gets mentioned," he says, ruefully. But he defends himself. "She said she wanted one." She even knew which make and model.

The problem, he claims, was his wife made this announcement in December. If she had just waited until January, all would have been well. "It shouldn't have gone under the Christmas tree," he acknowledges.

Does this mean he's learned his lesson? "Well, there was the laser printer," he says, wincing again.

From now on, he vows, he's sticking to jewelry.

Surprisingly, "We did not observe any gender differences" between the bad gift-guessers, Lerouge reports in an e-mail. Yet men overwhelmingly seem to be the goats of wretched Christmas present stories. What's up with that?

"It is believed in the literature that women are more sensitive toward their partner's product attitudes, and they also provide their partner with more valid feedback," says Lerouge. The problem is, "men receive more and better feedback but don't use it. Women are more sensitive to information about the partner but don't receive it."