Buying Christmas gifts is a tricky thing to master. They seem to fall into two categories: the kind of presents you love, and the kind of presents you pretend to love. You want to like all your gifts equally, but you can’t like something you never wanted, or have no use for.
The good news is that your Christmas gifts can now join a third category: the kind of presents you love to resell online. If your last Christmas brought you a pile of gifts you want to re-gift, you might be surprised at the chunk of change you can get when you start selling that stuff on eBay. Who knows? You might even make enough selling last year's gifts on eBay to cover the cost of this year's Christmas gifts. But seller beware: a lot can change in a year.
This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2011.