'Tis The Season

The holidays are all about giving. Giving to friends, giving to family, giving to charity. I happen to love giving gifts, and I have it on good authority that I’m an excellent gift-giver.

But I don’t want to talk about giving. I want to talk about getting.

Mikey and Mattie covered their best gifts ever on a podcast episode, so if you want to know all about them, you can go ahead and fire up your iTunes and give that a listen.

In the meantime, what were my Christmases like?

One year I received Moon Shoes, Nickelodeon’s low-tech, plastic-and-rubber-bands attempt at simulating low gravity. These were the loudest, clunkiest contraptions ever created and so of course I spent my Christmas day afternoon galumphing around the cul-de-sac, disturbing the neighbors with the terrible sound of hard plastic on cold concrete. Surely my parents regretted this purchase right away.

Technically the best Christmas present I ever received was probably my DSLR. Two Christmases ago I got a Nikon D60 and a couple of lenses, and while I barely used it for the first year I had it out of sheer terror of breaking it with my clumsy recklessness, I use it a lot more now, and surely will well into the future. Unlike the camcorder I received Christmas of maybe 9th grade, when I was sure I was going to be an award-winning filmmaker, which sits in its case to this day, underneath some forgotten shelf in a dusty closet.

The worst gift ever? Probably pajamas picked out by grandparents. Don’t get me wrong; I love pajamas. But I sleep in t-shirts and cute comfy shorts. I don’t need a matching pair of long-sleeved shirts and pants with cartoon reindeer saying “Ho ho ho!” silk-screened onto the front. If you’re going to go that far, at least go all out for the grown-up footie pajamas. But I think I’ll stick to my standard shorts-and-t-shirts, thanks.

Footie pajamas aside, being a grown-up sucks in a lot of key ways, and I think Christmas is one of them. When you’re a kid, it's the best day ever, because you wake up in the morning to all these toys and then you have all day to play with them. As an adult, your Christmas list consists of clothes, and “necessities” like a new DVD player to replace one that broke, or an external hard drive. After the initial unwrapping, you’ve got the whole day ahead of you to... play with your brand-new Gap winter coat? That doesn't sound quite like the makings of the most wonderful day of the year.

This Christmas? Well, I'm hoping for some awesome boots. I still need a football to complete the sporting good store in my car's trunk. What else will be up to Santa. I'm just hoping it won't be coal. Or grandma pajamas. I've been good; I swear.

Well. I'm trying.