Tired of seeing your expensive and carefully chosen gifts end up months later as the flotsam and jetsam of post-holiday shores?

It's fun to buy stuff. But remember last year's failures -- that robotic pet that broke two weeks after Christmas and the pricey pale pink cashmere sweater your husband will never wear. And now he wants another iPod, like the one that went missing a few months ago?

This year choose gifts that will keep on giving. For your immediate family -- especially your kids -- make finding a gift that will actually appreciate in value a priority. Even if you end up buying them some cheap junk to fill up all the space under the Christmas tree, be sure to choose at least one gem that will last and hopefully grow in value.

The following is a range of gift ideas could apply to spouses, kids, mom, dad and even grandma and grandpa. They may not be worth more next year, but you can bet that in 20, 40 or 60 years time, they will all be worth more than that HDTV you're contemplating buying now.

1. Jewelry. Think gold, silver platinum. You can't go wrong.

2. Gold or silver coins. Put one or two in a nice velvet bag. They are pretty and fun as well as excellent stores of value.

3. Savings bonds. It's hard to jazz these up. But get your kids or nieces and nephews some to sock away. They may not squeal with delight when they open the envelope, but they will appreciate them later on.

Jim Cramer may deserve a lot of praise, but in our analysis consistency is not one of his strong points. Tonight on MAD MONEY he looked into his crystal ball and showed us the future. Before seeing the future, though, he had to take us to the past ... not far, naturally. Just back to Monday morning, and pretend you owned Open Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN). If you did own OPEN, you would have been up $7 on the buyout.

What is he finding in his crystal ball? No, it's not Dorothy and her little dog, too. It's "THE NEXT OPEN."

He says the next OPEN is S1 Corporation (NASDAQ:SONE). He said that Carlyle and another private equity group is buying OPEN,and they may sell some off and keep some. Private equity firms, he says, are the buyers of last resort these days. Not only that, but they tend to parrot one another. If you were a private equity firm, and you were looking for something like OPEN, you would find SONE. SONE offers solutions instead of just software, and three-quarters of the company's business is recurring.

He also wanted to go over the fundamentals. SONE dropped the ball with no growth in 2005, and he thinks they are back on track in 2006. Cramer said if you start adding this in after a couple days it will work. He said they also have some tax credits that will keep it from paying out too much in taxes.

SONE closed down 0.8% today, but shares have now jumped more than 15% to $5.80 in after-hours trading.

So much for Cramer's attitude of "We don't want to buy stocks just because they could be buyout candidates."

Jon Ogg is a partner in 24/7 Wall St. LLC; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.