One year, I gave my older brother a doorknob for Christmas. It wasn’t something he needed. It wasn’t even a new doorknob bought at a hardware store. The knob, scuffed and scarred, was simply the first item I came across when I went rummaging through the junk drawer on Christmas Eve.
Merry Christmas, bro. Enjoy that.
Another year, I got the same brother a complete taco kit, with shells and sauce and everything. I wrapped each item individually, including the head of lettuce and the six-pack of tomatoes. The benefit of this ploy was that it meant numerous items on the Christmas tree, which really satisfied the more-is-better philosophy.
The downside was that lettuce doesn’t do well sitting on a hot floor beneath a conifer for a week.
I once gave a girl a toilet plunger for Christmas. In my defense, it was a very nice one.
One year, as I frantically tried to do all my shopping at Laverdiere’s on Christmas Eve, I suffered a gushing nosebleed and had to be treated at a local tavern. Everybody on my list got T-shirts from T. Woody’s Bar and Grille that year. Some of them were dotted with blood, but the thought was there.
If a throbbing nosebleed isn’t a classic case of the body revolting against unbearable time and financial pressures, brother, I don’t know what is.
As humans, we are conditioned to hunt and gather food with which to fill our bellies and nourish our children. It’s what our cave-dwelling forebears did to survive. What they DIDN’T do is wait until a period during the harshest time of the year to go off in search of frilly scarves, wind-up toys, plants that grow out of a human head made of plaster, sparkling gems in shiny bands, shirts, socks, slacks and boxes of specialty candy.
There is just no fossil evidence that primitive man bothered with any of those things, and it fully supports my assertion that Christmas shopping is an unnatural thing to do and, what’s more, it may be a form of lunacy.
Even the annoyingly efficient finks among you — those freaks who have their Christmas shopping done by mid September at the latest — have surely been out to the stores on Christmas Eve a time or two to pick up a few last-minute items to sink to the bottom of Little Bobby’s Christmas stocking. And if you’ve been in the stores on Christmas Eve, you know that lunacy may be an overly generous term.
There’s a look in the eye people get when the final minutes are ticking off the clock and the day of reckoning is bearing down. Behold the balding man (he had a full head of hair when he came into the store) standing in the automotive aisle of a department store, turning a Fram oil filter over and over in his hands. He doesn’t need this item for his car, no, but in the Yule-sickened regions of his brain, he’s wondering if his wife might like it if it was wrapped up pretty with a bow.
On another day, at a more reasonable time of year, he would recognize this as folly. On Christmas Eve, that Fram oil filter (it’s the XG9018, which will fit a Buick LaCrosse) sparkles like a diamond as his few remaining synapses pop and fizzle like a dying Christmas bulb.
In another part of the store, a younger man is weaving back and forth in the Aisle of Last Resort. A week ago, this aisle contained nice packages of meat and cheese spreads. There were bath kits, scented soaps, boxes of specialty cocoa, exotic candies and other items that at least LOOK like they were designed to be given as gifts.
But by Christmas Eve, all the passable stuff has been picked over, and now the poor slob is resigned to buying his new bride a can of Cheez Whiz and a box of saltines, or a rather menacing looking item designed to remove dead skin off tired feet.
You don’t believe this fellow has gone clinically insane? He has. It’s his first Christmas with his new wife and he blew it. By New Year’s Eve, he’ll be blowing his party favor alone at one of the motels on outer Lisbon Street.
Throughout the store you’ll see them, daze-eyed shoppers who waited too long and who will end up wrapping ash trays, cans of flea powder, shoe horns, dented cans of Pringles and coffee mugs with inappropriate messages (you got “World’s Greatest Lover” for your gramma?) for their loved ones.
It is only the madness of the survival instinct that keeps them going, unable or unwilling to admit defeat. The lucky ones will suffer horrific nosebleeds and spend their holidays in a hospital or saloon.
Throughout the year, I keep dynamic lists of things I might buy as gifts for specific people. The list is there 24 hours a day and crammed full of perfectly valid ideas for Christmas shopping, but have I picked up one single thing from those lists? Nossir, I have not.
One week until The Day and I have doomed myself to become one of those demented desperados trying to do it all in one mad spree in the final hours. Why? Because Christmas shopping is madness and because I am stupid.
Fortunately, the ultimate purpose of the holiday is to rejoice with our friends and family and to celebrate our good tidings. The measure of a good Christmas is found in the happiness you embrace much more than the number of wrapped gifts beneath the tree. At least that’s what I’m going to suggest as I hand over the ash trays and bar T-shirts to those people who mean so much to me.
Have a very Fram Oil Christmas, everybody. And I mean that sincerely.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
