You know how the more birthdays we have,the greater the chance is we’ll get the same gifts year after year after year? My 91-year-old friend, Katarina, clued me in on that a few years back at her cousin’s 88th birthday party.

Every time cousin Oberanne opened a gift, Katarina whispered to me, “She got that same vacuum for her 84th birthday . . . got that same blender for her 79th birthday . . . that’s the exact same GE turntable microwave oven with the custom functions that’s sitting on her kitchen counter and it’s not even a different color . . . got that on her 80th birthday.”

Ever since that day I’ve been on a quest for unusual gifts for aging friends and family such as the Peugeot Elis Electric corkscrew, which according to the advertisement allows you to open your wine bottles “one-handed, with eyes closed.” If any of you have met my relatives, this was a major selling point.

I’m also looking for gifts that really were not available over the past . . . say 100 years. And those wily Germans who gave us seasick outer space traveling fish have come to the rescue again. A German firm is selling cow f-a-r-t-s in a can. In polite company, that would be cow flatulence in a can. But gaseous emanations from the back end of a cow are still cow farts in my book.

The company marketing it has identified a target audience, said to be city folk nostalgic for the good old days in the countryside when everyone took a hardy deep breath upon awakening and felt all warm and gushy inside at the sweet smell of farm do-do. In Germany, there seem to be a startling number of such people, and business is exploding. Whether or not buyers are those who actually have worked on farms is still unknown. Although I personally have never worked on a farm, I have never pined for the aroma of a latrine, be it derived from animals or humans.

I’m sure it helps that the price is right. At $8 a can, this is something I’d buy for all my friends and family. Even if your gift stinks, both literally and figuratively, at least you’re not out a lot of money and what would the odds be that they’d be receiving two cows in a can. I’ve wasted more money on a mocha-mint specialty coffee with the flavor of what I imagine hot boiled compost would taste like, if you were to gather and boil compost. And no, I haven’t tried it myself, neither the boiling nor the tasting.

The cow fart company has had such great success with canned cows that they’re expanding into the full farm family of odors. Next will come horse-in-a-can, followed by straw-in-a-can, the ever enticing smell of pigs-in-a-can, and rounding out the line will be farm manure-in-a-can. I suppose canned manure will include all the poop smells in one, since I’m assuming horses and pigs is the smell of the whole horse and the whole pig, not just the gaseous releases of said animals.

I can’t wait to see these come to the U.S. Is it an aerosol spray? Perhaps it’s an ignitable scent candle? Oh, that probably wouldn’t be a good idea given what my husband tells me about teenage boys and matches.

Well, whatever it is, I’ll be first in line at the WalMartia fighting the crowds on Black Friday 2012 to get some.

Cohea, a freelance writer, can be reached by e-mailing  a37_tao@hotmail.com.