With the holiday season nigh, here are a few gift ideas for those near to the knife scene:

• For the Texas court that ruled an assisted-opening knife is a switchblade (see pages 10 and 52 of the August BLADE®): A copy of the Texas switchblade law. For the court to make a legal decision contrary to the law is worse than Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez being the chad checker in his own election/coronation.

As BLADE field editor Lowell Bray wrote, “Two things are troubling about the court’s opinion. First, the [Texas legal] definition says that a switchblade is a knife that opens by gravity or centrifugal force—which [assisted openers] don’t—or a knife that opens automatically by pressure applied to a button or other device located on the handle. The ‘button’ on these knives is ‘on the blade,’ as the officer testified.”

The judges on the court in question should be summarily dismissed, defrocked and disbarred.

• For BLADE reader Dave Young: A special place in BLADE annals. After the aforementioned Texas court erroneously declared that assisted openers are switchblades, Mr. Young wrote his state representative, Craig Eiland, asking that Eiland take action to correct the court’s egregious ruling.

Eiland wrote Young back and said his staff was working on corrective legislation. (See page 6, November BLADE.) BLADE will be watching to see what comes of Eiland’s effort.

• For buy-American-made-knives-only enthusiasts: Patience. Once upon a time, inexpensive Japanese-made knives threatened the U.S. cutlery industry.

However, it didn’t take long for greed, market and other factors to take hold and Japanese-made knives became just about as costly, if not more so, than American-made ones. There are signs that the same could be happening with Chinese-made knives.

• For Glenn Marshall, who celebrated his 80th year of making knives in 2008: the knife industry’s equivalent of the Purple Heart (though Glenn was awarded the real Purple Heart and many other medals in World War II when he lost an eye, ear, his spleen and his gall bladder during an explosion on Okinawa).

Can you imagine how many times he’s cut, nicked, abraded and otherwise “donated blood” in the eight decades he’s spent making knives in his Mason, Texas, shop?

• For the New York City police officer who saw a box cutter clipped to a man’s pocket and arrested the man for allegedly carrying a gravity knife (page 62 December and page 39 January BLADE): Cutting—with a box cutter, of course—and hanging sheetrock 9-to-5 each day for a month. It wouldn’t teach him anything about gravity knives but it sure as heck would teach him the true meaning of a utility tool that cuts.

• For knife show knifemaker exhibitors and attendees: A watch and a calendar. Knife show dates and times are clearly marked beforehand. Most knifemakers exhibit at what—four or five shows a year, maximum?—and they can’t plan four or five times a year to take half a day or a day off the following day to rest up after staying until closing time the last day of the show?

Give me a break! (In fact, with some shows ending on Saturdays now, they don’t even have to take the next day off!)

As for show attendees who wait until the last day of the show to go and expect to buy their “dream” knife—dream on! Today’s knife enthusiasts are way too sophisticated to leave the show’s top knives unsold until the last day.

Come to think of it, what would really be disturbing is if the best knives were still available the last day of the show. Now that would be a problem!

Oh—and happy holidays!

Sewell, Holger Pass

The knife community lost two more good friends recently with the deaths of Holger Enge and Logan Sewell.

A supporter of Canadian knifemakers and knives in general, Enge wrote for BLADE and seemed on the verge of becoming much more involved on the cutlery writing end. He lost a seven-month battle with Cushing’s Syndrome on Oct. 7. He was 61.

A long-time collector of antique bowies—several of which are pictured in the landmark publication, The Antique Bowie Knife Book—arms and other collectibles and a leading member of the Antique Bowie Knife Association, Sewell (left) was the great-great nephew of Samuel Levi Wells III, one of the principals in the 1827 sandbar fight near Natchez, Mississippi, that made Blade Magazine Cutlery Hall-Of-Famer© James Bowie a legend. (See Jack Edmondson’s “Antique Bowies are in His Blood,” August and September 2005 BLADE.)

Among the organizers of the Jim Bowie Knife Show in Natchez, Sewell enjoyed many years as a community leader too, culminating with his being named the 2008 Citizen Of The Year by The Natchez Democrat. He was 87.