To get an article started, all I need is a single sentence that serves as the title. The act of typing a title across the screen does something to get my creative juices flowing — even if I know that title is not especially original.

Or even very accurate.

So I was pleased as Punch one Saturday morning when I woke up well before my 5 a.m. alarm (Hey, I have to write these columns sometime) and had the title you just read enter my mind.

Now I think you’ll agree that it is not especially original. I never attempted to improve it, however, because of something else it is not — very accurate.

My guess is that you are now expecting to read in detail about how one Christmas I bought my father an indoor spinning bike and my brother, niece, and nephew mountain bikes. How for years after that I purchased my father high-protein, low-fat meat snacks made of primarily ostrich or elk by the case and yearly swimming pool memberships for my brother’s family.

Or how this year I’m adding a year onto the gym memberships of my sister-in-law and niece and buying my brother and my nephew about 10 pounds protein powder and some other supplements for them to make the ultimate pre- and post-workout shakes.

But you won’t.

That’s because I wasn’t considering material things when “Give the gift of health and fitness” popped into my head. I was thinking about how time-crunched you probably are during all the seasons of the year and how getting the gift of time would give you the opportunity to eat better and work out more.

If that happens to be your case, you now need to consider ways to make time your gift request. For instance, is there some chore at home that you could ask someone else to take over to create enough time for you to cook healthy meals or get in a workout?

Or is there an item that would in essence create time?

For example, would a contract with a lawn-care company allow your hubby to turn the two-mile Saturday summer run into a five miler followed by a bit of upper-body weight lifting and the proper amount of stretching? Would a selection of light dumbbells in a travel case allow your wife to open the hatch of the minivan and lift weights for 30 minutes while still watching your daughter’s soccer game from afar?

While these are the sorts of gifts you can possibly get someone else, the giving of something to someone else wasn’t what I first thought about when I envisioned this article’s title. What came to my mind is how you could give the gift of time to yourself.

Yes, yes, I know that it is better to give than receive. I’ve heard and read that phrase dozens of times before, but I’ve also noticed that the well-known phrase employs the comparative form: “better.”

What’s “best,” I propose, is the sort of gift that does both.

So now I’ll ask you to take some time, think about the way your life is currently structured, and figure out some ways that you can say Merry Christmas (or Happy Chanukah or Kwanzaa) to yourself.

As you do that, I’ll conclude the column with two possible ways to do this.

If there’s a reader out there who wouldn’t benefit from getting another hour or so of sleep each night, I’ve never heard from him or her. What I hear or read from time to time is how young parents are being sleep-deprived by an infant’s erratic sleep patterns or how parents of teens are doing odds jobs around the house late at night because they chauffeur their teens everywhere before that.

If either is your case and there’s no chance of increasing your nighttime sleep time, see if you can occasionally allow yourself the 20- to 30-minute miracle called the midday nap.

I’m such a firm believer in its restorative powers that I make one a priority after my lengthy Saturday bike ride. Even though I have had a good dose of caffeine that morning (300 to 400 milligrams usually), I fall asleep almost immediately, and I almost always wake up in a half an hour without using an alarm and feel wonderfully refreshed.

Another strategy to consider is cooking in bigger quantities.

Many of the healthy items I make myself are time intensive. A concoction I’ve mentioned before, a mixture of fat-free cottage cheese, cocoa,and natural calorically insignificant sweeteners — stevia and erythritol — takes 15 to 20 minutes if I make enough for that day every day.

But if I make a week’s worth, I eliminate six time-consuming clean-ups as well as the hassle of pulling all the items from the cabinet shelves.

Done once, the week’s worth of this snack takes no more than an hour.