BIG question...what's your budget? What kind of pics do you like to take? Do you travel away from base much?
I use a Minolta Dimage 7i (5 megapixel) it's great, it has a 28 - 200mm SLR equivalent lens, works on AA batteries at a push but uses rechargables at £8 for a set of 4. It takes a 1 Gb IBM microdrive so I can store hundres of pics when I travel (up to about 1,500 pics in fact) and it has a load of manual adjustments and handles like an SLR. The thing is, it costs about £700, can Santa run to this?
If not get an Olympus C-4000Z, it too runs on AAs and takes Smartmedia memory which is cheap.
Avoid a camera that uses proprietary memory and batteries (i.e. Sony) because when you are in the wild and your batteries go flat you can't just buy AAs to carry on shooting. The Sony memory stick only goes up to 128mb capacity so you'd need many for a long trip