Christmas shopping for the woman in my life has always been a challenge, but what I saw on a mall outing over the weekend left me more bewildered than ever.

I was looking through a rack of fine blouses and came across one sized "Petit X-Large."

Come on, ladies, who are we trying to kid here?

This seems to be one of those clear cases where it's either one or the other.

While you can never rule out any possibility when it comes to females and their vanities, it's difficult to imagine some delusional woman buying a piece of clothing with that tag for herself.

So it must be a test of how stupid men can be.

What guy in his right mind would dare gift his beloved with a garment labeled to evoke the image of somebody 3 feet tall and shaped like a pooh bear?

It brings to mind the TV commercial suggesting that if you buy your lady a pair of $99 earrings containing a couple of drops of gold and few chips of diamond, she will plant smooches all over your face — and heaven knows what else after the cameras stop rolling.

Yeah, right.

The gullible fellow who falls for that one probably arrives in the store to find saleswomen rollicking in laughter before they up-sell you to the idea that what you really need to buy if you want to live to see another Christmas is one of those three-diamond rings they also advertise that — for a mere $5,000 — tell her you'd marry her all over again.

Not that men lack our own tricks or are any less vain.

We have our "big and tall" clothing stores where we can pretend that the problem is not that our 'opu are oversized, but that we are too Michael Jordanesque in physique to fit in regular garb.

I must say, however, that I personally became acquainted with such establishments because of issues of longitude as well as latitude.

It started early in my marriage when my mother-in-law caught a glimpse of the cleavage between my buttocks while I was working in the yard.

Her mom was so horrified that my wife vowed on the spot that no woman would ever again be subjected to such an outrage.

From then on, my gifts for my birthdays, Father's Day and Christmas were always shirts with long tails.

But I'm cursed with the kind of waist — or absence of one — that simply won't allow shirts to stay tucked in my pants, so she was still constantly chasing after me and pulling down the tails.

That's when I decided to visit a big man's store to see if a shirt that was X-Long as well as X-Large would do the trick.

It's worked out OK, I guess; most of the time now my backside is safely covered all the way down to my knees.

The only problem is that the shoulders of the elongated shirt sag to my elbows and the cell phone in the pocket droops down to my navel.

I'll let you men in on my secret to buying gifts for women in a way that puts our stupidity to work for us:

Whatever her body shape, get everything in size "Petit XX-Small" and let her exchange it for whatever she really needs.

It has all the advantages of copping out for a gift certificate, while gaining us a little credit for at least trying to pick out something thoughtful.

As far as getting her to buy you what you really want, you're on your own.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.