The Christmas Letter is one of the oldest human traditions and the product of the innate desire to share one’s accomplishments with others, even if they don’t care about you, or the fact that your daughter is one of the better cello players in her age group.  The first recorded example of Christmas letters was back in the Cave Man Days when nobody had thought of Christmas yet but people were sitting around thinking that they needed to take a break from chasing mastodons and throwing rocks at each other to ponder the mysteries of the universe, such as why they were walking around in the freezing cold with nothing on their feet.   In those days, some cave people had more than others, so the ones with extra animal heads would leave them on other people’s doorsteps, which was a perfect way to say “we have extra stuff” without being of any help or comfort to the neighbors. 

The tradition went along like that for a while but really took shape thousands of years later when Americans stopped worrying about wolverine attacks and typhoid fever long enough to be nostalgic and decided that others in the country would be interested to know how many bushels of wheat they were able to thresh without any machinery. 

By the time I came around, the practice was commonplace and each year our mantel was flush with cards from scores of people my parents knew, or had once known, including one from an acquaintance who offers 2,000 word essays each year that include the title of every book he read in the preceding year (complete with italicized parenthetical commentary!), detailed accounts of his visits to fellow college glee club members who live in New Jersey including the size and location of the hot tub in which they sat to discuss how much fun it had been to be in the glee club, a dozen or so awkward comments about his second wife and her gardening prowess, and ultimately, some uncomfortable information about his daughters dating men who already have children.  

With such a thorough introduction to the niceties of Christmas lettering, I was thrilled to begin my tradition in 2007.  At the time I had a live-in girlfriend and figured that in this day and age that was sufficient stability to warrant updating people about my life.   My rules are that the letter must contain at least one item that makes my wife uncomfortable, two things that make my mother uncomfortable, and as few facts or serious sentences as possible.  I found my first edition Christmas letter the other day while sorting old files and noticed that I ended the letter with a not-so-subtle dig at then presidential contender John Edwards.  Unfortunately I didn’t have any notion that he was cheating on his cancer stricken wife, or lying about fathering a child with a new-age skank so my cracks about his "son of a mill worker" shtick and “two Americas” jive now seem relatively benign.

I started the Christmas card tradition for the selfish reason that I hoped my card would prompt my friends to reciprocate so that I would be able to enjoy the scores of letters that have given me so much entertainment in my youth.  Sadly, I have not reaped nearly as many letters as I have sown, either because people think my letters are stupid, or more likely, because I’m not as nice as my parents and never gave some pain in the ass guy the impression that I liked him well enough that I wanted to get a letter from him about his second-wife and how nicely she sponge painted the garage (If I believed  in reincarnation I’d think she’d been an interior decorator in a past life!) after she sold her condo and moved into his when they decided to get married.

The truth is, I’m not drawing nearly as many letters as I would like at this stage of my life, and most of the ones I get are tasteful updates from my extended family who all subscribe to the “no pictures of yourself after you have children until they get married or have children” rule and who generally avoid too many details about their son’s lacrosse exploits. 

Thankfully, my parents are still pulling serious volume at home in Vermont which means that I get to relive my youth on my first ski trip of each New Year.  There’s something magical about The Christmas Letter; something reassuring about the fact that certain people’s delusions persist from year to year, and something amazing about the fact that the people who were in the glee club with this clown 40 years ago are still inviting him in their hot tub.  

When George Bush was in office, the State Of The Union was fun to watch for a number of reasons.  The first was that it allowed viewers all of the benefits of getting to see Dick Cheney's disgusting face and trademark grimace on national television for more than an hour without having to listen to any of his misplaced smugness or other bullshit.  It was also fun because it was an opportunity to see George Bush’s cognitive shortcomings in stark relief, such as when he tried to say polysyllabic words or when he used his patented "say something and then say "in other words" and then say almost exactly what you just said" rhetorical construction.    

What I love most, though, is that it is predictable.  It is predictable in that it is always split into three sections; the section that explains whatever the biggest issue of the day is, along with some reasons why it is either worse, or not as bad as the general public thinks, the section where the president introduces bold and seemingly ridiculous/irrelevant policy suggestions, and lastly, the section where the president yells a series of one-off pronouncements about things that excite his party.  

For Bush, the first section was all about war, the fact that we were attacked on 9/11, and how incredibly dangerous the world was, and how Jesus, or God, or someone had come down from the mountain and told him that he was to bestow freedom upon every person on the earth, as long as they weren't gay. The second section, contained his push for the colonization of Mars and immediate creation of hydrogen sport utility vehicles, and the last bit contained about a dozen or so references to how government should have a limited role, specifically the role of writing checks to private companies to do all of the work the government would otherwise do and lots of other work and non-work that the government hadn't done before.   

The minute Barack Obama was elected I started thinking about how cool it would be to hear him give a State Of The Union, mostly because of his “slow-lightning fast-slow” cadence but also because I knew it would be a rare chance to simultaneously have Joe Biden in front of the camera, and an absolute guarantee he wouldn't say anything that would make me want to hit him with a tire iron.   

In keeping with the formula, the first twenty minutes of tonight’s speech were devoted to jobs, specifically, their creation.  According to the President, the road to full employment is paved with $4,000 tax credits for small business, moderately harsh language directed at financial institutions, and an end to the partisanship and bickering that, along with no term limits and the fact that PACs and corporations can get weasely senators such as Joe Lieberman to do anything, have stifled progress.  

The latter half of the first section was devoted to health care, and included the president’s charming, self-deprecating and persuasive plea to his colleagues to continue the conversation, and his direct acknowledgement that he is “partially” to blame for the fact that most Americans don’t understand the nature of his proposed reforms.  One imagines that some other part of the blame known as  “all of the rest of the blame” could be placed upon Harry Reid, who, despite having an unprecedented bullet-proof majority, managed not only to be bossed around by a Senator from Nebraska, but also reached new heights of ham-handedness when he managed to disrupt his own pathetic progress on the matter by getting to spend an entire week trying to explain why he used the word “negro” in relation to the president in a year that was not between the years of 1860 and 1940.

In the “bizarre suggestion” phase, Obama did not disappoint, suggesting a three-year freeze on spending, beginning in one year, on everything  except for defense spending, health care, social security, social programs, programs for the blind, poor, elderly or pets or stimulus plans, or basketball courts in the White House.  Judging from ovation from the badly-dressed Republican delegation this proposal will be met with more support than his other suggestion, a way to change student loans that either makes them free, or partially free, or eventually free.    

Stage three was also by the book and contained requisite shout outs for the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell, childhood obesity and immigration which would have seemed important if they hadn’t been totally overshadowed by the presidents’ amazing interaction with his wife that confirms two things 1) the president and his wife do have sex 2) they will not be having sex tonight.   

It’s a new day America.  Sure we’re still fighting two stupid wars and pretending that the middle class still exists, but for the first time in at least thirty years, the guy in charge is certifiably cool.   

*due to today's early publication, there will be no publication on Sunday - the next column will appear Wednesday 2/3

My wife and I have two dogs.  Their names are Wallace and Bleecker and they are so small that we have a genuine fear that they might be eaten by a hawk.  Depending upon what day you ask my wife, Bleecker was named for Bleecker Street in New York, or for the Simon and Garfunkle Song “Bleecker Street” which is named for Bleecker Street in New York.  I came up with Wallace’s name while watching a show on Animal Planet about a fat kid named Liam from England who had a pony named Wallace who was having issues with biting Liam.  As luck would have it, the horse was expressing aggression because Liam was hitting it and pulling its hair.  After all of this was caught on tape, the boy’s mother came up with a solution to everyone’s problems which sadly, did not involve letting the horse kick Liam in the teeth, but instead rewarded him for not physically abusing his miniature pony by serving him “crisps” which is almost as pretentious a name for potato chips as Wallace is for a pony, or a 6 pound dog.

The only downside to our dogs other than vulnerability to raptors, is that they are subjected to endless small dog discrimination, mostly from people who have Labradors or some other kind of dog that sheds and jumps all over company and knocks everything over with its tail and takes up too much room in a car but whose owner insists is “just the best family dog”. I think black labs are boring and have never met a golden retriever who I liked well enough to justify getting its hair all over my clothes but I’ve never had the stones to say it to a dog owner’s face and recognize that even annoying dogs are wonderful creatures.  What’s amazing to me is how people criticize small dogs in front of me, even after they’ve seen that my dogs are cuter and easier to handle than their ridiculous golden retriever which they refer to as a “golden” because it makes it sound cooler than what it is, which is a dog that is as rare as daylight and will definitely suffer from hip displasia.

One of the best parts of dog ownership is being privy to a host of dog-related discussions.  One of my favorites is when I talk with prospective dog owners.  Men, in particular, have all kinds of preconceived notions about dogs that they think are original, and always feel the need to mention.  Most often, men say they want “at least a medium sized dog”  because “they don’t want it to be too fragile” which sounds like the kind of thing you’d be worried about if you were getting a dog as a boxing partner.  They never say it, but the insinuation is that wimpy dogs like mine could never keep up with the manly lifestyle of taking walks around the block or riding in a car that they have planned.   

Another favorite is some variation of the “I need a dog that will be able to climb mountains with me” remark.  This wistful idealized vision of dog ownership that involves the guy fighting for his survival with his trusty dog at his side is usually espoused by people such as my wife’s uncle who drive Audis and climb two mountains a decade.  It’s also these people who make clichéd comments about me, a man of large stature, being emasculated by my dinky dogs, despite the fact that I could whip their ass while their trusty labradoodle was running around rolling in mud puddles and not coming when it’s called.

At our dog park I heard a grown women who wears work out clothes at all times and sends her kids to cello lessons and who I’m sure doesn’t work, referred to my dogs as “puntable”, which she thought was very funny.  Notwithstanding the abject cruelty the name congers up, the notion that anyone would promote animal abuse, in jest or otherwise, would be surprising, if it didn’t come from a woman whose biggest thrill was attending yoga.

My dogs aren’t perfect; Wallace occasionally pees on the floor if we leave him home too long, and Bleecker is occasionally a wimp and makes me carry him on walks when he gets road salt in his feet.  But by and large my dogs are obedient, affectionate, don’t smell, don’t shed, and are phenomenal companions, which is more than I can say for any large dogs I’ve had or any large dogs owned by at least 65% of people I’ve known in my life.  As much as I’d like to believe it, their wonderful behavior isn’t a result of my dog training but rather my subtle 40x size advantage which plays a significant role in establishing my role as their leader and engendering their adoration.  True, my dogs will never pull a sled or climb the high peaks, but neither will yours, because you aren’t going to climb the high peaks, and even if you were you’d realize you were going out to dinner after or staying in a hotel somewhere and bringing the dog will be more of a pain in the ass than it's worth.   

In an economic crisis such as ours, a lot of people are talking about what you can do to survive in your financial life.  On CNBC there is a woman named Susy Orman who, in addition to being annoying, is a woman.  Suzy is able to draw upon her experience as woman to help other women be better investors in the women’s economy, which apparently exists aside from the regular economy.  Orman is popular, because apparently, some women find being patronized by fellow female better than having to listen to regular investing advice from men. 

A popular segment from Orman’s show is called “Can I afford it”, and is a bit that women would find totally offensive if conducted by a man, but where, as the name suggests, a women named Donna might call in to ask Suzy whether or not she can afford a Bichon Frise puppy.  Donna says the puppy costs $400 and is worried that if she buys the dog she will be unable to put her children through college.  Suzy’s first step is to remind Donna that the cost of a puppy doesn't stop at $400.  Next, she performs the difficult math of adding up food costs and veterinary bills and telling Donna that if she can afford $300 a year, she can “probably” afford the dog as long as her husband doesn’t lose his job. 

Another thing experts love to talk about is the “flight to quality” which is a term financial experts give to the fact that when corporate stock is doing poorly, people buy gold because it has "intrinsic" value.  Mostly, though, people buy gold when things go badly because that’s what their grandfather told them to do.  I suppose the theory behind this notion is that if the rest of the economy went up in smoke and we had roaming gangs and 40% unemployment, you could trade some gold for a rolling pin, which you could use as a weapon.
 
In fact, gold's obvious lack of intrinsic value has played out so frequently through history that its downsides should not be hard to understand.  Anyone who’s been through the 12^th grade remembers how a gold-centric view of the world served the Spaniards, who spent most of the 17^th century making sure they would go from being greatest power on the planet to basically irrelevant except for making excellent ham and being home to several bars that claim to be Hemingway’s favorite place to drink.

History suggests that the Spaniards’ grandfathers might have told them about the flight to quality in the 14th century, and that the Spaniards took them seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that they started wanting gold even when times were good, and eventually traded guns and things that could be made into guns in exchange for gold.  Also they stole gold, and acquired gold through some small-pox related dealings.  When push came to shove, however, the people with guns were surprisingly, able to defeat the Spaniards, whose strategy was mostly weaving tapestries out of gold and riding around on horses that were covered in 2,000 pounds of armor.

It probably isn’t fair to blame Spain’s precipitous drop in world standing upon its thirst for gold, because they also got involved in some notable religious wars.  It’s also worth pointing out that they were, for some reason, under the rule of inbreds from Austria who had enormous lips and thought that Spaniards would have great success fighting with their neighbors which was not a good idea at the time because people still hadn’t realized the French were sissies.

Many of the experts that write and talk on the subject of financial matters in a bad economy tend to focus on being responsible.  In Boston there is a guy named Rick Shafer who for some reason, has his own radio show even though he has a voice for coal mining.  Rick’s idea of responsibility includes owning a Hyudai, which he can’t pronounce, and saving between 30% and 80% of one’s income, depending upon how little one likes one’s children.  Rick's cleverest idea, however, is to keep a savings account with a mere 6 months of expenses just in case something goes wrong, like for example, being broke every month like just about all of his listeners. 

Assuming the Worst Case Scenario, it would be hard to say which approach is correct.  In fact, there's a part of me that thinks the best idea is to buy another puppy; if only Suzy took calls from men.

My wife and I have the least efficient home in history.  On a good month the cost of heating our 1,100 feet is roughly the same as the lease payment for a Ferrari.   

One of the reasons it is so costly is that the furnace is 200 years old.  The other reason is that our house is a carriage house, or more accurately, a barn, which two men turned into a little house 35 years ago when it was the 70’s and people were doing things like living in their cars and doing stained glass work in exchange for meals at a church, or walking up to people’s houses in Brookline and asking if they could live for free in their garage if they promised to turn it into an apartment.  And since it was the 1970's, the people who owned the houses were all for it.

As a barn, our house has lots of unexplained quirks such as holes into the basement and ceiling, feeding troughs in the corners, and hayloft-bedroom that has either zero insulation in the floor, zero insulation on the 12 foot cathedral ceiling, or both.

A few times since we’ve moved in, we’ve tried to squeeze a few extra days out of our tank of oil and ended up in a situation where my wife is angry with me because she has to take a cold shower or get her hair wet in the sink and blow dry it to make it look like she took a shower like I did when I was in the 4^th grade when the cool kids started taking showers every day.  Running out of oil sucks not only because it means an angry wife and no shower and no heat and general unpleasantness, but because it means having to pay the oil delivery people extra to come and prime the pump, $35 to be exact. 

This has only happened once.  Actually, it happed another time but we were on our honeymoon and hadn’t yet realized that our “perpetual water heater” uses significant fuel to heat water even when nobody uses the water for 16 days so I don’t count it against us.  Last week it happened again.  I noticed the tank was low one afternoon and called the Oil People.  The Oil People told me my options were to pay a $75 fee for emergency delivery in addition to the obnoxious price of oil, or to wait until the following morning and get the regularly obnoxious price.   I opted for the later, and left for my monthly card game, which is held in a humidor and involves a certain degree of cigar smoking.  When I returned from my game I was disappointed to find the water was cold, for the obvious reasons, and because I cannot get in bed with my wife after smoking a cigar indoors without first discarding all of my clothing outdoors or in the basement, and then taking a lengthy shower, which still doesn’t really get the smell out of my hair, and definitely doesn’t get the smell off my hands.

When I got back from work I noticed my tank was full but my furnace was idle and called the Oil People and inquired as to how quickly they could come out and restore my heat.   The woman informed me that I could get someone out for a service call but that since it was not going to accompany my oil delivery, it was going to cost me $90.  I had some choice words for her and threatened to find another oil source, which, it turns out, is virtually impossible when you rent your home. 
 

Feeling stuck, and knowing that I had to come up with something before my wife came home, I meandered to the basement to have a look at the problem.  Knowing something about machines, I viewed several wrenches and tools in my toolbox, and then touched approximately all of the various valves and hoses until I found what I thought was the oil line.  I then located what I thought to be a bolt, which I turned with my hand in either a counter clockwise or clockwise fashion until a steady stream of brown liquid began squirting directly over the plastc cup I had carefully placed beneath the hole and all over my hands, shoulders, legs, pants, and the floor.  Once I had determined that the substance was oil, I jumped to my feet, wiped off my hands and then pushed the button to fire up the furnace. Bingo!  

The actual act of priming my furnace took roughly 50 seconds, and even factoring in the odds of blowing my face off or burning down the house, I still think it was worth it, especially since it’s not my house.  I suppose $90 isn’t the end of the world, but you have to stand for something, and if your hands smell like cigars there’s nothing like a half gallon of fresh heating oil to mask the scent.

 Commuting is one of my least favorite things. In my case, I have two choices for how I may commute. The first, is to ride with my wife.  If I wish to ride with my wife, I must be prepared to be late, and to admit that it is nobody's fault, unless my wife gets up late, needs to dry her hair, and losses the keys and races around the house looking for them, in which case, I am required to admit that it is my fault.

If I wish to be accountable only to myself, my lone option is to take the subway.  Boston's subway is regarded as “decent” in the spectrum of mass transport options, but since this tranche on the spectrum also includes  Miami's carnival-rideesque monorail which exists solely to create the appearance of “urban bustle” during opening scenes of movies, Boston's “T” still sucks.

I live on the Green Line, which is the slowest of the lines, and which has a healthy mix of old cars that frequently do not work, and newer cars, which work, but due to train physics, are frequently stuck behind the older, broken, trains.  The newer cars arrived a few years back and though they appear to be much larger than the existing fleet, are actually smaller than the old cars, which were made in France, 100 years ago, when Babe Ruth and Paul Bunyan were the only people over 6 feet tall.  Since I am not an engineer (the fake kind who drives trains, or the real kind of builds them) I can't give a scientific reason for why the new cars manage to be smaller than the old ones, but I think it has something to do with the fact that the new cars have a staircase built in the middle of them which eats square feet and causes all those standing atop the staircase to feel like they are standing in a basement.

A lot of people like to ride the T because they like to “people watch”.  People watching, for those who don't know, is an activity which began about the time people stopped spending all of their time worrying about catching leprosy and involves watching other people in stressful situations, and chuckling to yourself about their pleated khakis.  Sometimes, people watching changes from a mere amusement, to an act of self-preservation when, for example, you are on your way to a constitutional law exam and a person next to you on the train begins singing Polish folk songs in an extremely high voice.  Hypothetically, this person might become so enraged by the fact that she thinks someone else is singing the Polish folk songs that she will tell them to shut up, repeatedly. When the person refuses to stop singing, you might look around to see how you will defend yourself if she decides you are the person singing, just as she throws a scalding hot cup of coffee on your lap.

In a small city such as Boston, there is a good chance that you will get to commute alongside an annoying co-worker, who lives one stop beyond you.  If you are fortunate, the train will be so crowded that he will be forced to stand way on the other side of the train car, and shout to you for twenty minutes about the fact that he can't find a job  until he gets off and you go one stop further to make sure he doesn't know where you live, even though, in a moment of weakness, you told him you would join his poker game.    

If you have to wait for a train where I live, you must stand outside in whatever mother nature has to offer, but if you are lucky enough to be underground, there is a great chance you'll have your experienced sweetened by the charm of street performers.  Boston's laceName w:st="on">GovernmentlaceName> laceType w:st="on">CenterlaceType>, is the epicenter of the city's music scene.  On a good day in the summer, one could conceivably hear a Equadorian man play Simon & Garfunkle cover tunes with pre-recorded synthesizer accompaniment and a guy playing certain notes of guitar over top of a tape recording of Joe Satriani playing different notes on the guitar. 

On days when I'm on my way to work in a crowded car, sweating through my undershirt, smelling the mix of feet, body odor, and cologne I have to wonder if I wouldn't be happier living in some sleepy suburb.  But then I think about the suburbanites who are stuck, all alone, in their SUVs, drinking coffee, listening to Imus, and I decide that I would definitely be happier living in some sleepy suburb.  Sure, I wouldn't be so close to laceName w:st="on">FenwaylaceName> laceType w:st="on">ParklaceType>, but if I'm going to be blamed for being late, I might as well have a leather seat.

I have a so-so relationship with dentists.  For the last four years my relationship with dentists has been less so-so, but only because I haven’t had dental insurance so the closest I came to a dentist was when I skied with one at Vail for a week in 2005 and rode a chairlift with a different one at Sugarbush in 2007.  

My early childhood included an episode best described as “jumping off a couch and smashing my teeth on a coffee table” which set the stage for a lifetime of dental difficulty.  As a young boy I had a mouth full of cavities and a black front tooth that I displayed proudly in every photograph taken of me between 1983 and 1990.  I’ve always maintained that it was this tooth, or the fact that she was a closeted-lesbian, which lead my high school girlfriend to tell me that what she liked most about me was that nobody else thought I was good looking.

As a young kid I went to a dentist called Dr. Marshall.  Dr. Marshall was enigmatic and arrogant and said short sentences such as “cuspid” and “suction” while holding his hand out for the help of one of his ever-giggling assistants when he came into the room for thirty seconds at the end of every visit.  I spent so much time in Dr. Marshall’s office over a four year period that I developed a mild interest in the music of Yanni.

My dislike for Dr. Marshall at a young age was mostly based upon nose hair and coffee breath, but by age 20, was tempted to drive 3 hours to Vermont and choke him with gauze pads when I became a victim of his 12 year-old handiwork.  I was packing my bags for a spring break when I realized that the front of my face was swollen, slightly, to the point where it appeared I was a soccer ball under my upper lip.  Curiously, no amount of Bud Light or pain pills obtained from a skinny guy named Alex did anything to reduce the swelling so I found myself on the phone with a Honduran dentist who was the only man willing to work on my mouth at 7am on a Sunday so that I could get to my plane in time.  While his English was less than perfect I recall him using the words “should be in prison” when describing the mess Dr. Marshall had made.  As it turns out, when treating a dead tooth and a severe infection, the right method of treatment doesn’t involve covering it with a temporary cap, failing to inform the patient or his parents that a root canal is required, and then forgetting about it for ten years.

After I returned from my vacation I paid several visits to an endodontist, who is a dentist who other dentists complain makes too much money.  This guy used assorted intoxicants in his work so I don’t recall much from my time in his office but thousands of dollars later I had another fake front tooth that is not quite the right color and feels weird and works as a constant reminder of what I would like to do to Dr. Marshall if I ever see him doing anything but driving around in a Range Rover.

All had been quiet on the dental front until about a week ago when one of my molars split in two while I was engaged in the strenuous tooth-related task of sitting in my car and pointing at a building.  I was overcome with fear at having to pay for whatever dental nightmare was to follow and thrilled when I obtained enough care to stop the pain for a mere $90 at the hands of moderately skilled second year dental students at Tufts University.  My dentist-in-training was a guy named Isaac who had the acne of a 15 year old and the soft hands of a pipe fitter.  Isaac worked under the tutelage of a guy named Dr. Oldium who appeared to be in his 80’s and referred to Isaac as “Ethan” at least 7 times while telling him to hurry up, or coming by to redo all of Ethan’s work which was either incomplete or ineffective.

Initially, I thought I might have made a poor choice when Isaac was ready to discharge me in my pain-induced deliriousness after failing to identify the problem tooth despite my excellent description or the fact that half of my tooth was gone and I was bleeding profusely.  I continued to think I had made a poor choice when he drilled my tooth with the care most people reserve for trying to punch a hole in leather with a screwdriver.  When he was finished, Isaac informed me that despite his efforts there was a very good chance I’d need a root canal “within a year”.  Dr. Oldium for his part, told me the work they’d done might last 50 years.

I’m not sure where the truth lies. The saying would suggest somewhere in between, but I assume the saying was written before there were dentists.  My plan is to have it checked periodically because I can’t take another Dr. Marshall experience, and have come to realize that I can’t rely upon serendipitous skiing-related dental interaction to keep me safe.

I spent Christmas with my wife’s family this year.  In addition to attending Roman Catholic mass and eating Manhattan clam chowder, the main difference between my family traditions and hers is that most of her family is local, which means they have enough people around on Christmas for a Yankee swap.  Only my wife’s family refers to the game as, “Chinese grab bag,” which I assume has its roots in some negative stereotype about the way that Chinese people share gifts, but has become nearly politically correct as nearly everything up for grabs in the game is made in China.
 

I love this tradition because while I grew up with many Christmas traditions, none of them involved as much confusion or shouting, except the tradition where my father made us all line up by age in the hallway on Christmas morning and my mother would yell at my father because her hair was messy and she didn’t want to be in the picture.  Some years, when my grandparents were visiting, my father would make his mother get in the picture as well, which she hated.

In Chinese grab bag, everyone takes a number.  This number establishes the order in which people open gifts.  The people at the end of the game have a higher probability of getting the gift of their choice and the ones at the beginning have a high probability of getting a scented candle which is a crappy gift even in a game that contained a 3 liter bottle of grape soda.  The rules of the game are murky, subject to interpretation and bickering and are too complicated to explain, but generally, they facilitate a disorganized movement of gifts from player to player until someone is stuck with a book about making balloon animals and someone else is stuck with 5 worthless lottery tickets after feeling very excited about having ended up with them. 

The key to playing the game effectively is to involve several strong-willed people such as myself, who, despite the fact that nothing is the game is worth more than $10 and most of it will end up left at Grandma’s house, get visibly upset when someone tries to steal the same gift twice in one round, or steals back the fart machine that someone took from them a few minutes prior. 

Three years ago was my first experience with the game and I brought a beautiful pair of jumbo Chinese-made lion slippers from Wal Mart.  They were somewhat of a hot item and I tried to win them for myself but instead, ended up with 6 pint glasses that said “bling” on the side of them.  The proud owner was my wife’s teenage cousin who used her late pick to steal them right off of my feet.  The following year, I had another crack at the lions when the cousin reentered them in the game because much to my dismay, she hadn’t even taken yet worn them or removed the tags.

This year, my wife and I had Thanksgiving with my family, which meant that the Chinese Grab Bag Steering Committee had to meet without us.  We heard a review of the minutes from mother in law who said that someone moved to establish clear rules for the upcoming game and that the motion was seconded and affirmed by almost everyone but that eventually there was so much disagreement about what the rules should be that everyone sort of dropped the conversation.    

With so much uncertainty leading into the game, my wife and I decided to play it safe, she by offering a matching orange coffee maker, iron and toaster, and I, by cruising a dollar store and picking an epic assortment of expired silly string and private label soft drinks as well as a Spiderman watch and other plastic toys that were guaranteed to break almost immediately.

Prior to the start of this year’s game we found rules on-line and printed them out before some of the more competitive participants arrived.  The main change was the institution of the safe-haven for the 4th "owner" of any gift.  Though there was some hand wringing at the notion of a codified gaming experience, everyone grew to appreciate the structure and we ended up with an organized game that contained minimal voice raising but had all of the cogitation we have come to expect from some of my wife’s deliberate relatives.

I enjoyed this year’s contest but think I’ll push for the dissolution of the rules in next year’s event.  It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the peace and quiet, or coming away with a two-tone CVS pocket knife with built-in LED light, but I think the real meaning of Chinese grab bag is lost when the fourth person holding the lottery tickets is able to take refuge in the rules and doesn’t have to worry about ending up with a pot holder.

^{This year for Christmas I made my wife a sculpture of a man dancing on top of a Pink Floyd album entirely out of old records. It was kind of a spur of the moment decision that resulted from a combination of cold temperatures and a well-documented recession/depression that forced my hand to a gift that was thoughtful and could have been free if I’d remembered I already owned PVC adhesive.}

It all started when I was cleaning our bedroom in an unrelated attempt to please me wife. I was dusting near her dresser and knocked 13 pairs of jeans from their neat pile alongside 27 other pairs and into the abyss behind. I moved the bureau slightly to retrieve the jeans and exposed a large box of records such as The Best of Bread, Adam Ant, and the Roger Daltry album where he has a curly blond mullet and is depicted as a man/horse combination.

The albums were put there by my wife, who last Christmas, discovered that in addition to making our house smell like a tire factory, she could make bowls out of records if she heated them in our oven. She got so excited about this hobby that at one point in the months that followed I intentionally purchased a heavily-scratched John Denver album.

The notion that I would make a sculpture would surprise anyone who has ever seen me write my name or do art of any kind. But there have been times in my life that I thought seriously about a career in professional art making, such as all of first grade and most of second grade. My dreams ended abruptly, however, in April of 2^{nd grade when Mrs. Barrett, my pointy-nosed teacher with broken capillaries asked us to make "realistic" sharks using two sheets of paper stapled together and crumpled up paper which we would put into the middle of the shark to give it its life-like appearance. The instructions were to use only pencil to color the shark which Mrs. Barrett said was the only way to draw a realistic shark, but only if we colored all in the same direction. In my earliest memory of the "I have no idea what someone is asking me to do so I’m just going to take a guess" dynamic, I spent approximately three hours dragging my pencil in one direction across the shark and then lifting my hand and dragging it all the way down the body again because I didn’t realize I could go back and forth along the same plane which would have allowed me to finish the project in about 10 minutes.}

My teacher saw that I was far behind and instead of watching my technique, made an often-accurate assumption that I was wasting time and told me hurry up, which I did by scribbling feverishly in all directions.  The final product was a shark that even I didn’t think was realistic. At the end of the year my teacher assigned me to go into a 3rd grade class with a bunch of weird kids that I didn’t know and allowed several of my friends to stay together as a "team" for the next year.  Though I never demanded a formal inquiry into the matter, I assume it had something to do with the shark, or the fact that the guys who got to stay together were the son of the superintendent and the high school basketball coach or possibly, the fact that they weren’t really my friends.

Even with my painful art making history I went after my dream of building something beautiful. This time, my only audience was my two dogs, who think everything I do is amazing and who conveniently liked chewing vinyl as much as they like chewing pens and dragging them all over our khaki colored chaise lounge. Since I had drawn a sketch of my design on the back of an envelope, the process of cutting limbs, hair strands and body sections was not terribly difficult, if you regard as easy, the placing 6 vinyl albums in a preheated oven and then cutting them with scissors once they are on the verge of turning into liquid. Once I had it all laid out, I began the difficult process of affixing the different body parts together, which began with my walking more than a mile to a plumbing supply store in the aforementioned bitter cold to buy PVC adhesive which for reasons not worth explaining, I already own but had forgotten was in my basement.

After 6 or 7 hours of work, I had a creation that I actually thought was objectively "cool" though admittedly unrealistic. I was so proud of the final product that I couldn’t wait for my wife to open it on Christmas. But after it was wrapped I had flashbacks to Mrs. Barrett and had second thoughts about having her open it in front of other people.  The risks were just too high. Third grade was awful, and I can’t stand the thought of going back there, even for a moment, especially without my wife.