Ten great car gifts for the drivers on your holiday list

Car-related gifts are a great way to say thank you during the holidays. Click through this list for some great ideas for all ages and budgets.

3. For the home-garage mechanic: Retrieving magnet

Courtesy of Master Magnetics, Inc.
Bendable magnets can retrieve small metal parts that fall in the engine bay.

If you have a do-it-yourself mechanic on your shopping list, it’s likely he or she already has a strong selection of tools and garage toys. And since technically inclined people tend to be very discerning about their gear, they can be tough to shop for.

Consider a supplementary tool, like the “magnetic retrieving tools” from The Magnet Source. These little devices are exactly what their name suggests; snake-shaped magnetic sticks that allow for the retrieval of tiny components buried deep in a car’s engine bay.

Similarly, magnetic parts trays (magnetized bowls that keep nuts and bolts secure) never outgrow their usefulness. And since many automotive projects are made easier by keeping parts separated, one can never have too many!

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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