I don't wrap presents well, but I wrap them

 

The AI Blog Post Image Generator gave me this photo. It distorted the guy's face, and I think he has six fingers on his right hand and only four on his left, but it...does the job. Merry Christmas, AI Blog Post Image Generator.

One Christmas many years ago, sometime early in our marriage, Terry noticed that all of the presents I had given her were exceptionally well wrapped.

As if an older woman had wrapped them.

This was because an older woman had, in fact, wrapped them.

I don't know if this is still a thing, but back in the day at Great Lakes Mall, you could have any gift wrapped for just a few dollars. There was an area in the middle of the mall where a group of expert wrappers stayed busy making everyone's packages look exceptionally festive.

I was quick to take advantage of this opportunity, given how much I disliked wrapping and the fact that my wrapping skills had always been somewhat lacking. I unhesitatingly forked over the cash to get all of Terry's stuff wrapped.

I was proud of how nice her presents looked, but I could quickly see that I had messed up. She wasn't mad or anything, but it was clear that she preferred for me to make the effort to wrap her gifts, rather than paying an expert to do it.

I got it then and I get it now, so I have been personally wrapping her stuff every Christmas since.

It took me a few years to get the hang of it. One time I used a piece of stinky old rope I found in the garage to bind one present. I have no idea what I was thinking.

But eventually I fell into a rhythm and can now wrap presents with something approaching proficiency.

The lesson I learned then as a young somewhat-newlywed (and should have already known) is that it's not so much what you give your loved one but the thought and effort that go into selecting and presenting it.

And now, 32 years into our marriage, I offer this guidance to any young man who is looking to make his girlfriend, wife, mom, sister, etc. happy on Christmas (or any other gift-giving occasion).

In most cases, she would much rather receive the box you wrapped yourself with the loose, uneven edges and the funny-shaped corners than anything wrapped by Marge at the mall with the curled ribbon and festive bow you never would have selected on your own in a million years.

Trust me on this one.

The Atari 2600 was the greatest Christmas present I received as a kid

I don't know these kids, but I'm very familiar with the thrill of unwrapping an Atari on a memorable Christmas morning in the early 80s.

I had great Christmases when I was growing up thanks to my parents, who were not only generous and loving but also big fans of the holiday itself.

Until maybe the late 1980s, in addition to a tree and the usual household decorations, my mom would also set up a table in the living room on top of which she would lay out various Christmas desserts, candy, nuts and fruit. It would all just be sitting there for the taking for the two or so weeks leading up until December 25th, and believe me when I say I did plenty of taking.

When I woke up on Christmas morning, my presents would usually be laid out on the couch in the living room. And they were all unwrapped, which in retrospect seems a little odd, but that's the way it was.

Well, I should say that some presents were unwrapped and some were wrapped. Until I was maybe 9 years old, those unwrapped presents were the ones from Santa, while the wrapped ones under the tree were from Mom and Dad.

There would always be one expensive "featured" present. In 1984 (maybe '83) it was my Commodore 64 computer. Other years it was usually some electronic game or simply a physically large gift like an electric race track or something.

The most memorable of these marquee presents put an exclamation point on Christmas 1980 (or maybe '79...again, these years are getting fuzzy). It was an Atari 2600 video game system, and it changed everything.

Until the Commodore 64 came along, I played lots and lots of Atari games. I even had a little black case that was designed to carry 8-track tapes but in which I stored my Atari cartridges. Or at least I stored some of my cartridges, because after a while I had way more cartridges than the case could hold.

I would not only play Atari at home, I would also pack up my most popular games in that case and take them to my friends' houses to play on their Ataris. Those friends included Kevin, Mike, Todd, Ray and Dave, among others.

My friend Matt lived right across the street, but he had an Intellivision instead of an Atari. The Intellivision featured graphics and sound that were clearly superior to the Atari 2600, but the game play was sometimes lacking and it never quite earned the market share it probably deserved.

I have great memories of Christmas mornings and afternoons spent playing with everything I had received, and I will say that even at a young age, I was very grateful for it all.

It's a little more than two weeks until the big day, and even now at 55 years old, I can't wait.

Working through the dead zone between Christmas and New Year's

 

Years ago when I would plan my vacation days for the year, the first thing I would block out was the week between Christmas Day and New Year's Day. This was mostly to take advantage of the kids being home on holiday break so we could do things together and I could assemble heir toys while cleaning up the mess we had made in the living room opening presents.

Even now, with four older kids having moved out, I still like to take that week off to relax and recharge before returning to work in the midst of the cold and gray of January in Northeast Ohio.

This year, however, I've been working this week thanks to having used up all of my vacation days early.

There were a few reasons for this, the biggest of which was the week I took in March to accompany the Wickliffe Swing Band on its once-every-four-years trip to Disney World.

I wouldn't normally take a week off in March, and truth be told, I wasn't thrilled about burning a week of vacation that included a combined 40+ hours on a bus.

In retrospect, though, I'm glad I did it. It was a fun adventure, and it felt like the least I could do to give back to an organization that has given me so much over the years.

But those were the days I would normally reserve until the end of the year. Throw in the week I took in late June/early July for our family beach vacation, plus another summer week for our annual church retreat, plus the standard assortment of one-off personal days here and there for various reasons, and I found myself essentially out of PTO by September.

I'm whining about a first-world problem, of course, but it makes for an 8- to 9-month stretch between weeks off. That's a long grind, though one that's made easier this week by the fact that (a) I can work from home, and (b) most of my co-workers are on vacation right now, so it's very quiet and I'm getting a lot done.

Still, I do miss the slower, carefree days that normally make up late December for me. I can't do quite as much non-work stuff as I would like this week, though all in all I really shouldn't complain.

I will complain, of course, but I really shouldn't.

This Commodore 64 Christmas program brings back all the feels

 

I have mentioned before that the greatest Christmas gift of my childhood was a Commodore 64 computer, which my parents gave me in 1982. The C64 taught me to write basic code, gave me hours of gaming enjoyment, and was the machine I first used to go online.

That same year, the Commodore folks created and released the Christmas demo shown in the video above. More than once in '82 I remember walking into a store, going to the Commodore display, and seeing this demo playing. It was the perfect way to showcase the computer's then-powerful video and sound capabilities.

I offer you the chance to watch and listen to it now as a sort of holiday gift. For those my age who remember it, it's a wonderful bit of nostalgia. For those who have never seen it, it's a history lesson in early-80s home computing technology.

Either way, I hope it brightens what is already a bright Christmas Day for you. Thank you for reading this blog, and Merry Christmas!

Putting up the Christmas tree is one thing that brings the kids back home

The day we set up our Christmas tree and decorate the house for the holidays is always a big deal. It often happens the weekend after Thanksgiving, but this year it was the first weekend of December.

And as expected, it doubled our house population, even if only for a few hours.

Four of our five kids have moved out and are on their own, but that day we had two of them home (plus Jack, who still lives with us) to drag out the Christmas stuff, get the artificial tree upright and relatively straight, dig through boxes, hang ornaments, and perhaps most fun of all, reminisce about Christmases past.

When they were little, Christmas tree day was never difficult to schedule. We just picked a Saturday or a Sunday and they would all be there because, until they got to be teenagers, it wasn't like they had especially full social calendars.

Now, however, as is the case when we try to get family birthday celebrations scheduled, there are all sorts of factors that come into play. Vacations, work schedules, commitments with their significant others' families, and general young adult stuff can make it difficult to find a day and time that works for everyone.

This year, for instance, we put the tree up on a Sunday evening, which I'm guessing was a first. Jack was scheduled to work until 6pm, so we delayed the decorating from it's usual early-afternoon slot.

When you have little ones, the idea of a permanently quiet, empty house can be appealing. And believe me, it is kind of nice. But there are still times when you just wish you had your kid/kids at home for a little while, which is where the holidays really come in handy.

We'll see them all again in a few days on Christmas, but I have a feeling that, by the time I'm old and gray and can't see straight, memories of those Christmas tree setup days will be just as valuable as memories of the holiday itself.

I've reached the age when, like many dads, I cannot think of anything I want or need for Christmas

Every year until I was well into my 20s, I would ask my dad what he wanted for Christmas.

And every year he would say the same thing: "Case of beer."

He was always just kidding (he gave up drinking in the early 80s), and I always knew that would be his response, but it was like a little ritual we had to go through.

As I got older, this routine of ours got somewhat annoying because I really, truly did need to know what he wanted for Christmas. It seemed so hard for him to come up with something.

Now I get it.

Let it be known that, as I enter my mid-50s, I have no idea what I want for Christmas.

Clothes, I guess. And Amazon gift cards always work. And maybe the occasional classical CD?

The reality is, I have just about everything I could want. I don't have expensive tastes, and any time I want something, I just buy it for myself.

If I were particularly smart, which I am not, I would hold off on these types of purchases from, say, September onward and allow my family to get these items for me.

But of course I forget and just buy whatever I want whenever I want it. Then this time of year rolls around and someone in the family asks what they can get me and I'm stumped.

I suspect something similar happened to my dad all those years ago.

Which is why he always ended up getting the cheap plastic desk set or picture frame I would buy from the elementary school Santa Shop. (Come to think of it, that's probably the stuff he loved the most.)

The point is, I hate making a Christmas list because I don't need anything and I really don't even want anything. Peace on earth, goodwill toward men. I'll take a heaping helping of that, if you can swing it.

Otherwise, I don't know...case of beer, I guess.

I must be getting older and softer when it comes to the extended celebration of Christmas

For many years, I stuck to a hard and fast rule whereby I would never, under any circumstances, listen to Christmas music before December 1st.

I wasn't being a Scrooge or anything. I just felt the tendency to extend the celebration of Christmas back into November (or, in some cases, even starting in October) kind of cheapened the holiday. I have a lot of great memories from Decembers past and didn't want to water down future memories by making Christmas two months long.

If that makes sense.

Now, however, I'm not so strict. I've been listening to Christmas music since Thanksgiving Day. I haven't minded seeing decorations go up "early" on houses and in stores. And I've generally been much more OK with a somewhat longer holiday season than I was in the past.

So what changed? What switch flipped?

I hate to say it, but I think it's an age thing. Not that I'm ancient at 54, but there are a lot fewer things on which I'm "hard and fast" than there used to be.

If people want to listen to Christmas music in October or November – or July, for that matter – where's the harm?

Heck, if I want to listen to Christmas music any time of year, who cares? Christmas is what you make of it, and a rousing chorus of "Sleigh Ride" six weeks before December 25th will only negatively affect my experience of the holiday if I allow it to.

Granted, "Jingle Bells" in mid-summer still feels a little strange to me. But hey, you do you.

The best Christmas gift I got as a kid? That's easy.

I spent 1982 longing after a Commodore 64 computer.

I tried to find ways of saving up for one, but for most of that year I was 12 years old and in no position to earn the hundreds of dollars it would take to buy a C-64 and a floppy disk drive.

I put it at the top of my Christmas wish list with no real expectation it was going to show up under the tree.

Until it did.

I was pretty sure my premiere gift was going to be The Generals, an admittedly cool electronic board game that had come out a couple of years earlier. And I would have been fine with it.

My mom and dad, tricky as they were, had me believing that was what I was getting while going out and secretly finding a Commodore 64 for me. I'm not even sure where they got it. I'm guessing Sears.

Anyway, that little computer (laughably slow and weak compared even to today's low-end smart phones) became a huge part of my life over the next few years. I played games with friends. I learned to program in BASIC. I procured a modem and got online for the first time ever in 1985.

Back then, going "online" meant calling local bulletin board systems (BBSs) and exchanging messages with other people. The Internet existed, but I sure had never heard of it.

I should note that saying I "procured" a modem for my Commodore is a little misleading. That 300-baud device was stolen from the local BEST store by a group of kids with whom I went to school who were known simply as "The Vandals." They weren't sure what to do with it, so one of them gave it to me.

I chose to remain officially ignorant of the modem's origins, but I had a sneaking suspicion where it had come from. The guy who gave it to me confirmed its status as stolen merchandise only years later.

My obsession with the Commodore faded once the late 80s arrived and I had bought an IBM XT. From there it was one step after another up the technology ladder...more processing power, more storage, more features. The Commodore was put back into its box and relegated to the attic.

I was reunited with it earlier this year when we were cleaning out my mom's house. It was fun to see it, and I could have taken it home, but I chose not to. For one thing, I have a full-fledged Commodore emulator on our home desktop computer that completely simulates the original C-64 experience. For another, I hadn't kept any software for it, so its features would be limited.

And then there's simply the fact that you can't ever really go home again. The Commodore and I had had our thing, and we had both moved on.

Or at least I did. I have a feeling it wouldn't have minded playing one more game of Jumpman or Law of the West with me.

I received a lot of great gifts as a spoiled youngest child growing up. But nothing ever beat the surprise and delight of that little computer.

My family refers to me as Noo Noo

I know a lot of people are weirded out by the Teletubbies, that British kids TV show starring Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa and Po. And rightly so. They're creepy, no doubt about that. They're meant to be innocent and fun, but whoever created them was clearly under the influence of a substance of questionable legality.

One of the minor characters on the Teletubbies is a little thing called Noo Noo. Or "The" Noo Noo. I'm not sure which. And I do mean "thing," by the way, because that's what Noo Noo is. It's a little living vacuum cleaner that goes around cleaning up messes. The Teletubbies at least speak, even though it's gibberish. Noo Noo just rolls around making sucking and slurping noises.

Noo Noo's sole purpose in life is to clean, but he/she/it sometimes takes things too far, as in this video:

This, I freely admit, is me. I am Noo Noo, and Noo Noo is me. When I am home, my wife and children think the only purpose of my existence is to clean up anything and everything: Stuff on the floor, the dishes, various messes others make, etc.

You would think they would appreciate this penchant of mine. But I will also freely admit that sometimes I clean up stuff that is not at all intended to be cleaned up. Like for example, there will be a glass of water on the kitchen table, and my instinct is to remove it before one of the cats knocks it over. But the person who owns the glass of water has just stepped out of the room, and their cold beverage has now been dumped in the sink and the glass deposited in the dish washer. All in the space of 17 seconds while they were gone.

My bad. Next time don't leave your water glass there.

On Christmas morning, I have one job and one job only: I walk around with a garbage bag and collect all wrapping paper, discarded bows, tissue, packaging, etc. If you don't proactively give me the paper you tear off a gift, I will come over to you and snatch it. THERE WILL BE NO MESSES ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, DO YOU HEAR ME? NO MESSES!

I don't mean to annoy anyone, but I really, really prefer having a clean house whenever I can. It makes me happier. And if you're someone whose mess-making detracts from the cleanliness of the house, I will rectify the situation post-haste.

Compare me to a Teletubbies character if you must. I proudly wear the Noo Noo badge.

Coming to you live from a time when snow seems fun and desirable

A NOTE FROM THE BLOG: Yeah, so just like Wednesday's post, I wrote this one back in November when it seemed safe to assume that, by the time you read it, there would be snow on the ground in Northeast Ohio. There's not. It will in fact be a bit rainy and topping 50 degrees this weekend. Not your typical early-January weather here. So, yeah...much as I asked you to do on Wednesday, if could you just go ahead and imagine a whole bunch of snow on the ground right now, and also imagine yourself feeling sick of it and desperate for spring, I would be so appreciative. Seriously, who knew?


One of the interesting things about producing these blog posts so far in advance is that I'm often writing about future events that seem distant to me but are reality for the people who actually read these words.

Like shoveling snow, for instance. You want to know when I'm writing this? November 16th. Yeah, nearly two months ago. It's November 16th as I type this sentence, and to date I have not seen a single snowflake.

Therefore, I can think and talk fondly of snow. The fact that it's a hassle and that I get sick of it long before mid-January is forgotten for the moment. Christmas is 39 days away and snow seems romantic and fun right now.

But it's not romantic and fun. It's cold, slippery and frustrating. At least to me. And the act of removing it from my driveway -- sometimes many times over in the space of a single week -- is in no way something in which I want to engage.

But right now, there's a part of me that can't WAIT for the first big snowfall.

What's wrong with me? I know what's coming and I know I'm going to hate it. But I long for that first day or two when everything is white and clean and wintry.

The problem, of course, is that then I want the snow to go away, but it doesn't. It hangs around. For a long time. It gets dirty and ugly. And it keeps on coming.

We used to have a snowblower, but it quit working and we haven't replaced it. So until we do, it's just me (and sometimes Jared, if I'm not doing it at 5 in the morning) out there grimly shoveling away.

Ugh. I'm becoming such a snowbird. There's no doubt that I'll be traveling south for at least part of the winter sometime in the next several years. It's inevitable. I'm an Ohioan and I'm not 20 years old anymore. It's what we DO.

Anyway, I'm going to hold on to my snow naivety for just a while longer. In the meantime, please know that I feel for you guys in January who don't want snow around any longer. Really, I do, because in a couple of months, I'll BE you.

Guess I'd better start my Christmas shopping soon...

I'm not normally a procrastinator, but I rarely start shopping for Christmas presents much before, oh, round about now, I guess.

Yeah, two weeks before the holiday is usually about right for me. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But two weeks is pretty much my norm.

I fall right into Guy Stereotype #47 in that I do not especially enjoy shopping. I come up with a list of specific items before I leave the house, and then I go looking for those specific items. Once I find them, I go home. I generally do not buy anything else. As soon as everything on my list is checked off, I stop.

Then, at some point soon after, I wrap those same gifts. And I finish the whole thing as soon as possible in the same way I try and finish scooping out the cat litter boxes every morning. It's just another to-do that needs to be completed.

I actually don't mind crowds and traffic this time of year. To me they come with the territory, and a store full of people has a Christmas-like quality to it (Which is sad, isn't it? Because that suggests that buying stuff is the No. 1 thing I associate with Christmas. My bad.)

What I don't like is not finding the things on my list. So that's why I plan so extensively before I venture out to shop. I want to walk in, find what I need, buy it, and walk out.

Sometime this works, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work, I admittedly get a little frustrated.

So here's a holiday tip: If you're someone to whom I give a Christmas present, please check with me first for my List of Approved Stores at which I'm willing to shop. Also be prepared to tell me exactly where inside those stores I can find your desired item.

That's what Terry does and it works great for both of us.

Merry Christmas!

I only really get into Christmas starting tomorrow

December 1st. Every year, that's the day when I start acting like it's Christmas time.

Not before. Not a single day before then will I do anything Christmas-related unless forced to, such as purchasing and setting up our Christmas tree. My wife and children often coerce me into doing that.

But in my own form of protest against the now-insanely-long holiday season, I will not voluntarily sing a Christmas carol, eat a Christmas cookie, buy/wrap a present or otherwise acknowledge that it's Christmas before the first day of December.

Christmas is 25 full days into the month. Isn't that enough time to celebrate and prepare? Twenty-five days? I say it is. Why do we have to make it longer? To me that cheapens the magic of the season. Christmas is CHRISTMAS: The Granddaddy of Holidays. It doesn't need any help from us in for the form of October decorations or early-November shopping sprees.

So come midnight tonight, I will gladly take the road before us and sing a chorus or two of whatever Christmas song you'd like. But not before. Not a minute before. Tempt me all you want with holiday treats and my favorite Christmas tunes at 10:30 p.m., but I won't pay any attention. Two hours later? I'll gorge myself and sing at the top of my lungs with you.

Deal?

Deal.

A pointless Christmas story, just for you

It's Christmas Day, and the last thing you need is to read more of my drivel. So just a quick Christmas story that may be of interest only to me...

I must have been 6 or 7 years old. We had an old manual typewriter with which I was just fascinated. I loved playing with it. This was long before word processing and personal printers, so I enjoyed the fact that I could create something semi-professional-looking just by smashing on a few keys.

I would type on that thing for an hour at a time. Sometimes I would type real words. Other times I would type my name (over and over and over). And other times I would fill whole sheets of notebook paper with random letters. That's all I used, of course, was lined notebook paper. We didn't have typing paper in the house, and the only place I ever saw blank white paper was at school

Anyway, I used this typewriter a lot. We kept it in a burnt orange plastic case (this was the 70's, after all). One Christmas Eve, I had a dream that I came out of my room on Christmas morning and ran to the living room. But instead of my presents being laid out on the couch like they normally were, all I saw was a small square of that lined notebook paper taped -- yes, taped, like with Scotch tape -- to one of the couch cushions. And typed on that paper was an all-caps message from Santa:

"SORRY, NO PRESENTS FOR YOU THIS YEAR."

Not sure what I did at that point in the dream. Probably screamed or something. Terry says all of my stories from when I was a kid end with the phrase, "...and then I cried." Which isn't true, but for purposes of this dream, it probably was.

Of course I woke up and it was still Christmas morning, and Santa HAD left me presents so all was well. I even got the Evel Knievel Stunt and Crash Car I had been hoping for. That was awesome.

There's no real point to this story other than: (1) It's Christmas and that's about the only Yuletide nugget I could think of, and (2) I'm even stranger than I thought, and I've been that way for a long, long time.

Merry Christmas, blog readers. Your comments and feedback over the first two weeks of this venture have been greatly appreciated. Here's hoping I can think up enough material to keep it going into 2012...