In the Holiday Gift Forecast? Brain Freeze.

From now on, he vows, he's sticking to jewelry for his wife of 37 years.

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 towards 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."

Well, maybe. But then there's the woman who laughs about what her husband always says he wants -- a hot car. She laughs.

Gerald Edwards, 35, of the District, still flinches when he recalls the piece of jewelry he once gave his girlfriend.

"The quality was not what she expected," he says, morosely.

"Not cubic zirconium?" a lunch companion ventures, shuddering.

No, not that bad. It was a "bracelet from Zales" that he got in a mall in Gaithersburg.

What's so bad about that? What was she expecting?

"Three carats."

(She married him anyway.)

That business of people thinking they know you inside and out and becoming impervious to new information is a real problem, says Harriet Tregoning of Adams Morgan. "Old friends remember what you liked when you were 19." Fifteen years ago, Tregoning liked collecting things that were black and white. She's well past that phase, she says, but she's still getting ceramic cows.