The last week for Christmas shopping

This is the last of a three-part series about outdoor-related Christmas shopping.

So we are down to the last week of Christmas shopping. This leaves plenty of time to purchase most gifts for the outdoor-minded people in your life. The high-priced items or the items requiring special attention may not arrive in time to be placed under the Christmas tree.

An etched knife ordered from the Buck Knife Factory today, for example, will not arrive in the Columbia Basin until January. However there are ways to still give the gift of a knife. Simply purchase it locally and have the etching accomplished at a later date. Or, several local businesses have the ability to engrave and etch metal items, such as knives.

Although some items are difficult to obtain at this late date, they still make a great gift. This may be a bit farfetched, but take the example of a wife deciding on Christmas Eve to give her husband a rifle. This is certainly possible, but not with the physical firearm in hand.

The answer is to simply copy a photo of the firearm from the Internet or a catalog and place it in an empty box. Feeling a bit devilish, she throws in a few small rocks and wraps the box. This special detail is sure to drive the receiver nuts, while trying to figure out what is in the box.

The rifle can be ordered ahead of time, of course, and the order form placed in the gift box as well as the photo.

Other gift items, such as a spotting scope, binocular, GPS, rifle scope, can be treated in the same manner.

Although most of us have made the major purchases for this Christmas, there is still room for small items; stocking stuffers-type items. Simply walk along the fishing aisle of your favorite sporting goods store and pick up a few lures.

If the angler's favorite type of lure is known, a $25 or $50 selection may be a major gift.

A gift suitable for an outdoor-minded person who seemingly has everything is a smoker. These food preparation devices will provide the family with a variety of foods.

Smoked fish, such as trout, salmon, steelhead and walleye, are common throughout Washington State. However, smoking a turkey, chicken, pork chop or steak is also possible.

There are electric smokers and gas smokers. Less expensive smokers are able to only reach a relative low temperature, hot enough to provide smoke, but not hot enough to finish off a turkey. Others are able to not only smoke the meat, fish or poultry, but reach a temperature high enough to finish cooking the food, even a large turkey.

If your outdoor person has a smoker, consider buying some smoking chips or an accessory, such as sausage hooks or rack doublers. The doublers are ingenious parts, as they are designed to fin on the four original racks when turned upside down. This way they double the space for placing fish or meat to be smoked. On my Bradley Smoker, this means making an eight-rack smoker out of a four-rack smoker.

Another useful item is a cold smoke adapter. This part includes a hose, similar to a clothes dryer hose, which allows the smoke generator to be removed from the smoker and placed a couple of feet away from the smoker housing which holds the meat or fish.

The result is a smoke which is cold, so the food items don't cook during the smoking process. Smoked cheese is the prime example for this accessory. If cheese is smoked without the cold smoke adapter, it will melt and end up in the bottom of the unit.

Another example is smoking a pork chop. I enjoy smoked items more than my wife, Garnet. I am able to smoke a pork chop, which will be cooked later with Garnet's un-smoked pork chop.

Other smoker-related gifts include the variety of jerky and sausage seasonings from Hi-Country Seasonings. The products include seasonings for salami, summer sausage, bratwurst, kielbasa, 11 flavors of jerky seasonings and other food seasoning products.

This company also has fresh sausage seasonings, where a person can start with a pound of ground elk, beef, goose breast or ground turkey and end up with breakfast sausage. The idea is to enhance the meat brought home from the field or purchased in the grocery store.

Merry Christmas

From my family to yours: We wish you the best Christmas every, as you celebrate with friends and family.