If you're not into conspicuous consumption, you can always opt for edible presents. N-M has what they call a "Sweet Tooth"--one pound of solid chocolate shaped like a molar, roots and all, costs $10.

For the more complete selection of chocolate creations, check out Kron's Chocolates at the theater cafe in Chicago's Water Tower Place shooping mall. Kron's offers--in milk or semi-sweet chocolate--a female torso for $50, a leg for $60, and a telephone for $25. They also have golfballs, which come in white or regular chocolate, at four for $5; and several words--at $22 each, LOVE and NOEL, and a $34 THANKS--in alternating light and dark chocolate.

Pet stores in the area are offering several unusual creatures this year. Boston Pet Store in Cambridge has an assortment of tarantulas that cost between $15 and $30 depending on the species. If spiders make your skin crawl, don't fret--the lizards will arrive shortly.

Big Fish, Little Fish in Cambridge has a vast selection of fresh water sharks that range in size from two to eight inches and, as the store's general manager assured us, don't do any "serious" damage. The sharks are tagged between $3 and $20.

The store's most unusual pet for holiday gift-giving is the mudskipper, which the manager described as "a strange creature with bulbous eyes that lives partly in and partly out of the water." The "quite ugly" beasts kill for the sake of killing and are "pretty vicious." The store currently has several of the ferocious buggers that measure between one and a half and three inches long, but it is expecting any day now to receive some monsters up to ten or twelve inches in length.

Toys, not pets, are the mainstay of the holiday season, and New York's Hammacher-Schlemmer has several playthings for adults like a $49.95 astrological computer. Punch in your birth date, and this marvel of technological wizardry provides you with a personal horoscope and tells you what your personality traits are.

Also available is a $325 voice chess challenger that plays at ten skill levels and has a repertoire of 40 opening moves. For the more traditional, the store has an assortment of rocking horses that range in price from $750 to $2800.

The place for toys is F.A.O. Schwartz, which has stores all over the country, including two in the Boston area. Some of Schwartz's most unusual items are giant stuffed animals, including a six-foot-tall Snoopy, complete with a Santa Claus outfit, for $295.

To complement any child's menagerie of stuffed creatures, Schwartz has a life-sized horse that stands 18 hands high and sells for $2000 and a six-foot-tall giraffe for $1500.

For the child that aspires to be a gas-guzzling American consumer, Schwartz has taken Detroit's downsizing to its extreme by creating a seven-foot-long, three-foot-wide gas-powered mini-Datsun 280-ZX. The $795 car has a single seat, a fiberglass body, and a four-cycle engine. It gets 65 miles to the gallon and reaches a top speed of 15 miles an hour.

Some may argue that a mini-Datsun can spoil a child, or that a satellite antenna and a personal blimp are a bit extravagant. But what's a spoiled kid or a few hundred (or thousand or million) dollars when it all leads to more interesting holiday gifts? After all, if variety is the spice of life, unusual gifts are the frankincense and myrrh of the holiday season.