'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.

A Christmas Memory

It’s officially December, marked by a chill in the air, tree lots outside every grocery store and the commencement of ABC Family’s 25 Days Of Mediocre Christmas Movies.

This is not a story about the kind of Christmas movies that you fold into your family’s holiday traditions, watching year after year with a nostalgic glint in your eye and a candy cane in your hand. This is not a story about the classics. I’m not here to preach to the choir about how awesome Home Alone, Scrooged and Elf are.

No, instead I want to talk about the Christmas movies I couldn’t get enough of as a child. They’re almost certainly terrible, but I’ll almost certainly never, ever watch any of them again, so they’ll live on, perfect and faint in my fading memory.

When I was very young, I had a VHS copy of Babes In Toyland, the made-for-TV version starring a young Drew Barrymore (and also, apparently, Keanu Reeves and Mr. Miyagi. Whoa). I practically wore this video out, and my parents hated it—perhaps only partially because of the repetition, as it can’t have been good. All I really remember about it now is wanting to live in Toyland, but then, what kid wouldn’t?

Or what about Prancer, the 1989 classic about a little girl who keeps a reindeer as a pet or something? I think it was sick and she nurses it back to life, only to discover it’s really one of Santa’s reindeer. Or maybe it’s a movie about a girl having a schizophrenic break, but either way. Who didn’t love movies about kids with weird pets? Andre, Free Willy, Monkey Trouble—as kids we’re suckers for the idea of having an exotic animal for our very own, or at the very least, as our BFF. Although I don’t think a reindeer would provide the kind of stimulating conversation I’ve come to expect in a BFF.

Next up was All I Want For Christmas, a family film about a pair of kids trying to reunite their divorced-or-maybe-just-separated-I-can’t-remember parents in time for the holidays. Ethan Embry played the boy, and I might have had a crush on him, but I’m not sure. IMDb tells me that the kids’ elaborate scheme involved “mice, telephone calls, and an ice-cream truck,” though none of that rings a bell. To be honest, all I really remember about this movie is that it exists. Which is probably how I’m going to keep it.

Later came Christmas Every Day, the made-for-TV movie that basically ripped off Groundhog’s Day with a kid instead of Bill Murray. The kid in question was Erik Von Detton, on whom I definitely had a crush (later making Brink a cinematic masterpiece in my household), and he has to learn to not be selfish or to be nice to his sister or to shoot a basketball or something. In any case, it’s like Groundhog’s Day with training wheels, and who doesn’t love Groundhog’s Day? Ergo, Christmas Every Day—probably every bit as awesome as I remember. Maybe.

This Christmas season, I’ll probably be watching Love Actually, maybe Home Alone 2 (though never 3), possibly a couple versions of Miracle on 34th Street, but I think I’ll leave these others to my memory. We grown-ups just can't appreciate quality Christmas movies.