Ten great car gifts for the drivers on your holiday list

Car-related gifts are a great way to say thank you during the holidays. Is there a family member who serves as taxi driver for everyone else? An at-home mechanic? A sports buff? There’s something for everyone. Click through this list for some great ideas for all ages and budgets.

1. For the family taxi driver: Headrest DVD players

Courtesy Boss Audio Systems
This Boss universal headrest has an 8-inch widescreen TFT monitor and DVD player and sells for less than $200.

When your children outgrow the smiley-face steering wheel, you can still keep them quiet with a nice, educational DVD. Would I date myself too much by suggesting “Bill Nye The Science Guy”?

Headrest monitors used to be reserved for premium luxury cars and custom vehicles on MTV Cribs, but now they’re available at Walmart. Before you comment about the superior economics of portable DVD players and iPads, there are still those out there who prefer the aesthetics of integrated in-car entertainment. Besides, you might need to save the batteries on those portable devices for the long weekend at grandma’s.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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