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  The Neiman Marcus Edition Camaro is sold out, but you can still buy a 300kg Gingerbread Playhouse. Photo Gallery

Three minutes ? the time it takes to boil an egg. That?s how long it took for Neiman Marcus to sell out of the Chevrolet Camaro SS convertibles in their Christmas catalogue.

Buyers snapped up the 100 special cars almost before the famed US department store could raise the curtain on it.

The Neiman Marcus Edition Camaro is powered by a 6.2-litre V8 with enough blistering torque to make taking off from the lights a severe risk of peeling the exclusive metallic Bordeaux paintwork – and embedding the occupants irretrievably deep into the amber and black leather upholstery.

But the cars are not unreasonably priced at $75,000 each. And would be quite a sensible gift. Especially when compared with some of the other items in the Christmas catalogue.

Because while the excesses of the catalogue have been tamed in deference to the continuing fallout in the US from the financial crisis, there’s still enough there to please the smugly well-heeled and obscenely over-indulged.

If you want to start training your offspring early, and pitch conspicuous consumption at the child level, there’s more than a mouthful in the $15,000 full-sized gingerbread playhouse. Built from nearly 100kg of gingerbread, it’s decorated with 200kg of royal icing and thousands of giant cookies, lollipops and sweets. It’s spacious enough for your kiddies to easily play inside it, where they’ll find even more sweets and a lollipop tree. Hopefully there’s a stomach pump in there too. And a junior membership to Jenny Craig.

But it’ll keep the rugrats out of your way while you enjoy a $125,000 tequila party with 75 close friends. While you get to keep a bottle of the stuff, it sounds like a lot of money for drinking. But when you do the sums, it’s just $1600 per person – and we’ve seen some colleagues spill more than that on a decent Saturday night.

If you prefer to take your liquid externally, there’s a swimming pool installation from internationally acclaimed glass artist Dale Chihuly. The private commission will have Chihuly install a glass sculpture that covers the bottom of your pool, and will give you the effect of paddling around on the Great Barrier Reef. Now, admittedly this is stunning. But it’s also $1.5 million. And you can buy a lot of ferry tickets for that. And a snorkel.

Equally beautiful, and just as able to have you swimming on the reef is the catalogue’s $250,000 Metro Houseboat. A luxury floating apartment with walls of translucent aluminium and premium fittings, it offers the prospect of luscious weekends for two. Or the chance to take the Sydney Harbour ferry wars to a whole new level.

But when it comes to the ultimate statement, there’s no contest with the $250,000 diamond bracelet with charms commemorating 11 of the most outstanding of the catalogue’s gifts over the years – including an airplane, Chinese junk, hot-air balloon, camel, sarcophagus, buffalo calf, windmill, ostrich, robot, a puppy and a vintage motorcycle. Frankly, it’s hideous.

But fortunately they’ve made only one – and we believe that at the time of going to print it was still available, in case you’re interested. And if you are, we have a matching glitter-encrusted souvenir pendant of the Harbour Bridge we can let you have at an extremely reasonable $100,000 or so.