At press time, Christmas was two weeks from yesterday. And that means you’re too late.

If you’d started shopping a week ago, you’d have stood half a chance. But now the days grow shorter and the evening grow fuller: You have a brother-in-law to pick up at the airport. You have to drive out to Holland to cut down a tree, string lights on the porch. The parties start cutting into your shopping time: The invitations are starting to arrive, in the mail or on your desk or hanging from your doorknob when you come home from work. And then again—as you drive or walk home at night through the slush and snow, and you see the glittering lights and well-dressed swells—how can you resist crashing some of the better office parties in town, like developer Carl Paladino’s legendary gig in the lobby of the Ellicott Square Building on Decmeber 19, or Buffalo Police Commissioner Mac Gipson’s party at D’Arcy McGee’s tonight (December 13)? You can’t resist, and you shouldn’t. But you’ve got to start shopping one of these days.

The ski slopes are open, too, and how can you say no? Except that’s another day or evening of holiday gift-shopping gone. Come on, you say, how hard can it be: Three hours on Elmwood Avenue and I can get all my shopping done. Maybe so, but where are those three hours coming from, son?

If you’ve waited this long to begin your Christmas shopping, you’re not sunk yet. Here’s what we at Artvoice propose, what we propose every year: Get out a piece of old-fashioned notebook paper. (Your new digital lifestyle won’t help you here. You’ll need to carry this sheet of paper with you in your pocket or your purse. Paper doesn’t run out of batteries.) Write down everyone for whom you know you must buy a gift: loved ones, coworkers, mail deliverers, et alia. Then flip through these pages. We guarantee there’s a suitable gift for everyone on the list you’ve just made—a book, a CD, a ticket to a show, a dozen cookies that you can bake while painting a portrait of the cat on a mug for your girlfriend. (Just make sure it’s not the same mug she put in your stocking last year.)

Do something. Time is short. Tick-tock, tick-tock.