is in roughly the same vein as Pocket Santa. The app lets you organize your gift purchases by person, group, store and gift type. The interface allows you to easily budget your gift giving, and keep a close eye on who gets what and how much. And, as is generally the case with apps of this kind, it has a countdown showing how many shopping days are left until Christmas.

Santa's Little Helper has some very nice organizational features. Adding gifts is a snap. Each gift page includes a field for the item name, the person for whom the gift is intended, price, whether or not the item has been purchased and wrapped, the store where you bought the gift, and a note field. My one complaint about the way the app's database is configured here is you cannot assign the same item--a certain bottle of wine, say, or a particular book--to multiple recipients.

But you can plan your shopping trips according to store. And you can see at a glance how many gifts you've bought, and how many you have left to buy. The app also has a badge setting that shows you the number of gifts left outstanding from your device's home screen. You can also mark gifts as purchased and wrapped, which is a helpful tool to have around Christmas Eve when you've completely lost your mind in a blizzard of paper and bows. More vital, you can create an e-mail backup of your list and e-mail copies from your handheld. You can also set a password to keep unauthorized eyes from peeking at what Santa may be leaving on Christmas Eve.

Unfortunately, Santa's Little Helper has some big glitches: The app's greatest limitation is you can only add ten people. Even in this age of austerity, ten is probably not enough. And the function of the group settings is not immediately obvious. Turns out, there is more than one way to create a group. You might think, Well, I just tap the "Groups" tab at the bottom of the screen, tap the plus sign in the upper right corner, and create a group, right? That is a perfectly reasonable assumption. It's also mistaken. I managed to add two groups that way. But the third group... just... wouldn't... take.

The workaround is to edit the people on your list. Santa's Little Helper lets you move people on your list to a group folder, which you do by tapping an icon near the top right of the screen under the person's name. A new window will open showing your existing groups. To create a new group, simply tap the "Add item to list" button.