Plastic poker decks will sharply upgrade the feel of almost any home game. Once your loved ones shuffle and play with them, they will never go back to stiff, easily crinkled paper decks. Plastic cards aren't cheap -- about $30 for a two-deck setup -- but the more often one plays, the more worth the price they become. Among the most flexible and long-lasting are Kem decks, fashioned from cellulose acetate.

Plastic, on the other hand, is what you want to avoid when buying chips. The best ones are fired from clay, and the heavier the better. Casino-quality, 13-gram chips cost about a dollar apiece, and you can order them with your significant other's nickname or other endearing logo printed in the center. Unless your home game never has more than five players, you will need about 400, in at least three colors.

Why pay for clay? Flimsy plastic chips are difficult to stack and bet with. Worse, it's well nigh impossible to riffle two stacks of them together one-handed, the ultimate act of dexterous poker cool. To help achieve this and other deft fingering feats, why not try "The Official Poker Chip Tricks" DVD? A primer on how to play poker can make an excellent present. Most of these will pay for themselves many times over, assuming that your spouse has reasonable study habits and discipline, doesn't have hideous luck and doesn't spend too much time doing chip tricks.

The sine qua nons (that's the absolutely essential, for the non-Latin speakers) for the serious tournament player are Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie's two-volume "Harrington on Hold 'Em" (Two Plus Two, 2004) and David Sklansky's "Theory of Poker" (Two Plus Two, 1994). Anyone who enters a no-limit event without having read these three books is considerably reducing his or her chances of making money, let alone finishing first.

Other invaluable handbooks include "Championship No-Limit & Pot-Limit Hold 'Em" by T.J. Cloutier and Tom McEvoy (Cardoza, 2004), Doyle Brunson's "Super System 2" (Cardoza, 2005), "Phil Gordon's Little Green Book: Lessons and Teachings in No Limit Texas Hold 'Em" (Simon Spotlight, 2005), Barry Shulman's "52 Tips for Texas Hold 'Em Poker" (Card Player Press, 2005), Matt Lessinger's "The Book of Bluffs: How to Bluff and Win at Poker" (Warner Books, 2005), Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan's forthcoming "Aces and Kings: Inside Stories and Million-Dollar Strategies From Poker's Greatest Players" (Wenner), Blair Rodman and Lee Nelson's "Kill Phil: The Fast Track to Success in No-Limit Hold 'Em Poker Tournaments" (Huntington Press, 2005) and the first two titles from the World Poker Tour, Mike Sexton's "Shuffle Up and Deal" (Collins, 2005) and Erick Lindgren's "Making the Final Table" (Collins, 2005).

For beginners I recommend Sexton's book as well as Brad Daugherty and Tom McEvoy's "No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em: The New Player's Guide to Winning Poker's Biggest Game" (Cardsmith, 2004). Amazing-but-true poker narratives include Al Alvarez's classic "The Biggest Game in Town" (Houghton Mifflin, 1983), Anthony Holden's "Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player" (McClelland & Stewart, 1990), Katy Lederer's "Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers" (Crown, 2003), Michael Konik's "Telling Lies and Getting Paid: Gambling Stories" (Lyons Press, 2002), Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson's "One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey 'The Kid' Ungar" (Atria, 2005), Lyle Berman's "I'm All In: Lyle Berman and the Birth of the World Poker Tour" (Cardoza, 2005), Matt Matros' "The Making of a Poker Player: How an Ivy League Math Geek Learned to Play Championship Poker" (Lyle Stuart, 2005), Herbert O. Yardley's "The Education of a Poker Player" (Orloff Press, 1998), Michael Craig's "The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time" (Warner Books, 2005), "All In: The (Almost) Entirely True History of the World Series of Poker" (Thomas Dunne, 2005), an irreverent history by Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback, and the demurely titled "Annie Duke: How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker" (Hudson Street Press, 2005).

Those interested in the game's moral hygiene, along with gorgeous -- if captionless -- photographs and sophisticated advice on tournaments and ultra-high-stakes side action, will enjoy Barry Greenstein's "Ace on the River: An Advanced Poker Guide" (Last Knight, 2005), which illuminates issues of ethics in poker. Compelling poker novels include Bruce Olds' "Bucking the Tiger" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), Jesse May's "Shut Up and Deal" (Anchor Books, 1998) and Rick Bennet's "King of a Small World" James Mcmanus(Arcade, 1995). The game is also featured in some larger-world literature: Mark Twain's "The Professor's Yarn" from "Life on the Mississippi" (1883), James Jones' "From Here to Eternity" (1951), Paul Auster's "The Music of Chance" (Viking, 1990), David Mamet's "American Buffalo" (1975) and Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), originally titled "The Poker Night."

For alongside the Festivus pole, a table might be just the ticket. The table, after all, is the fundamental plane of poker architecture, providing dimensions and skin for its contentious clockwise camaraderie. Some of the poshest are Mark Lackley's custom-made cherry tables with ebony inlays, which run from $8,500 to $15,000. Eminently serviceable models, however, are widely available for roughly $300. An even less expensive option is a folding tabletop, which keeps cards from sliding uncontrollably and dampens the clatter of chips across wood or Formica.

Envelopes fit into stockings, of course, but what to slide into the envelope? Those feeling flush might suss out a week when their life partner won't have to work, identify a World Series of Poker Circuit or a World Poker Tour event taking place on those days -- ideally in a city they both would like to visit -- and then buy two airline tickets, make a hotel reservation and perhaps stuff enough cash into the envelope to enter the tournament.

To offset this expense, perhaps only one of the seats has to be in first class. Or perhaps not.