Flashlights all around!

One year I gave every member of my wife's family a flashlight. Cheap $1 ones from the impulse buy end cap at Sears. It was pretty much an afterthought and they were so cheaply built that I had about 30% of them fail before I even gave them. Even years later I'm remembered for giving all those flashlights. They forgot the $20-30 gifts, but they remember the $1 flashlights.

Today's LED flashlights are amazing. No burned out bulbs, longer battery life, and often they're brighter than the older non-LED lights.

There are plenty of $10-20 cheapies available in almost any store you go into. At $20-40 and available everywhere, the new LED Mag Lites, whether the little AA version or the big 4D cell version, are great gifts.

But for a lot of flashlight geeks like me, a Fenix light with a Cree LED is the next step. For about $50 , you can get a tiny pocket light that can be as bright as a massive D cell Mag Lite. My personal favorite is the Fenix L1D which runs from a single AA battery. The Fenix L0D takes a single AAA battery and makes a great keychain light. The Fenix P1D runs from CR123A lithium battery which can get expensive, but it's the brightest and highest-end of the single-cell Fenix lights.