Three Weeks 'Til Christmas

In exactly three weeks it will be Christmas day, so I figured I’d do a full-on Christmas post. (Is it possible that I’ll be doing another Christmas post in exactly three weeks? Quite possible, yes.)

In previous posts here on the blog I’ve already covered Christmas music and Advent. So now I just have to tackle all of the other assorted Christmas topics.

This post is also an example of how much happier I’d be as a blogger if I had been regularly taking photos throughout my life and then making sure to keep those photos in a safe place. I was able to find one photo of my old traditional holiday scene. No photos of any of my old Christmas trees at all. This post should be far more visually representative of my Christmastime history than it is. (Deep sigh.)

Anyway…let’s talk about Christmas, shall we?

Christmas Shopping

I used to love Christmas shopping. When I was young, my Aunt Grace would take me out shopping every year so that I could buy Mom’s presents for her birthday (December 14^th) and Christmas. I always loved the malls in early December.

[I wasn’t quite as happy with Dad grabbing me on my birthday (December 23^rd) every year and making me fight the crowds as he was just now starting his Christmas shopping. The day before Christmas eve is not a fun time to be in stores.]

Now I do all of my Christmas shopping online. Mostly on Amazon. A huge chunk of it between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I still enjoy sitting in my computer chair and picking up presents for my niblings, but it’s just not the same on the hands-on shopping that I did in days of yore.

I love gift-giving in general. Getting gifts for people was always my favorite part of Christmas. But from 2011 onward, the changes in my financial situations have limited the amount of gifts that I’m able to buy for people. It’s dwindled to the point that I currently am only buying for the niblings. My brother’s three children and my sister’s two. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I still love getting presents for those kids. I just miss the challenge of finding the perfect gift for people who want more than just toys for the holiday.

This year, between my two nieces and three nephews, I bought four LEGO sets and a plush Frankenstein head. (Which my sister assures me that her youngest will love, having been on a monster-kick since October that shows no sign of slowing down.)

What I really miss is putting together Christmas stockings. When I was probably eleven or twelve years old, it suddenly occurred to me that Mom was the only one in the house not getting a Christmas stocking. So I took it upon myself to get stuff to fill a stocking for her. Which I continued doing until the year before her last Christmas, when the family decided to spread out the Christmas stocking responsibilities and draw names to determine who would be filling a stocking for whom.

We continued that practice for years after Mom was gone. For several years after Dad passed ten years later, come to think of it. As time went on we did the stockings instead of gifts as opposed to in addition to them, and then we slowly stopped doing the stockings at all, primarily for financial reasons.

There were two occasions when I did a Christmas stocking for people outside of my immediate family that I knew from my periodic excursions up into Portland. But then those trips stopped (for health reasons – seizures, primarily) and now I can’t remember the last time I put together a Christmas stocking for someone.

Wrapping Presents

I’ve never been great at wrapping presents. After I’ve finished wrapping a gift, it looks like the job had been done by a child. A young, uncoordinated child. Or possibly an injured raccoon. At any rate, the end result has never looked ‘neat’.

The paper never gets cut to the correct size, the folds are awkward, and the tape is overused. While I am capable of using a simple peel-and-stick bow, don’t even think about ribbon. Ribbon simply isn’t going onto a package that I’m wrapping.

Eventually I just gave up and had someone else do my wrapping for me. So my presents to people each year would be a bunch of beautifully wrapped packages, and one gift that looked like it was wrapped by a mental patient, that gift going to the person who wrapped the rest of my stuff. (Kind of a reverse ‘thank you’ for helping me out, I guess.)

Nowadays, I do my shopping online, and have everything sent to my sister’s house instead of my apartment. Partially because (unlike Mr. Rogers) I don’t really trust the people in my neighborhood not to steal my packages. But also so that I can say, “Hey, since the presents are all going to your house anyway, would you mind wrapping them for me?”

The Christmas List

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will probably have noticed that I didn’t post this past Wednesday. (Health concerns keep trying to find ways to hinder my blogging efforts.) The post I had intended would have been titled “The Wishlist Phenomenon” and was supposed to catalog the evolution of the wish list concept from a simple what-I-want-for-Christmas document to the ubiquitous Amazon wishlist and beyond. I still might do that post someday. But right now I should talk about my Christmas list.

My memory doesn’t go back far enough for me to find a Christmas where I didn’t have a list of things I wanted. Mom has told me that as soon as the phonebook-sized JCPenney and Sears holiday catalogs arrived in the mail (yes, I am that old), I’d immediately go to the last section (the toy section) and begin deciding what I wanted that Christmas. After I’d had a while to immerse myself in all of that advertising, Mom would sit down with a notebook, and together we’d build me a Christmas list.

As the years passed, I’d write my own list. One year I started typing it on Mom’s old manual typewriter. And eventually I’d just print it off of the computer file it was stored in. And these weren’t short lists, either. My Christmas lists were always several pages long. Or one ridiculous length back in the days of fanfold computer paper.

People would typically thumb through that year’s list and say, “Wow you want an awful lot of stuff!” They usually wouldn’t come right out and say the accusation that was on the tip of their tongue, but I always got the message. They thought I was greedy. But nobody ever seemed to understand why my lists were so long.

Yes, on the one hand, there was a lot of stuff that I wanted. What kid isn’t in that position? But displaying the breadth and depth of what people thought of as my greed wasn’t what I was attempting. What my Christmas list was actually doing was offering them a wide variety of choice.

I’d seen shorter Christmas wish lists magnetically attached to the front of other people’s fridges. And in a lot of those cases, those five or six item long lists of what they wanted for Christmas were just a couple of weeks away from turning into lists of what they had gotten for Christmas. They didn’t ask for a lot and got everything that they asked for.

But I liked not knowing what was in those packages under the tree until I ripped off the wrapping paper on Christmas morning (or Christmas eve, or whenever the family gift exchange was being done that year). If I’ve only got five things on my Christmas list, I can probably tell just by the size and shape of the package what’s inside of it.

But if you chose your gift to me that year out of a couple of hundred options instead of just five, I’m not going to have any idea what you got me until I’ve opened it up. Christmas presents are meant to be surprising. (That’s the whole reason they get wrapped instead of displayed out in the open.)

Then came the year I published the 93.5 Christmas Special. Among other pieces of holiday nonsense (including some original short Christmas stories of my own), was a letter to Santa Claus. A letter I built thusly: I took my Christmas list, and instead of just listing the stuff and letting it go at that, I explained to Santa why I wanted each thing, in the hopes that the better understanding would make him more inclined to get me some of the stuff.

After doing that list-with-explanations, I found I couldn’t go back to a simple list of items anymore. I felt a deep burning need to explain and/or justify why I wanted what I wanted. And that’s when a lot of my friends started asking if they could have a copy of that year’s Christmas list. (I wasn’t doing a 2^nd annual Christmas issue or anything.) “Yeah, absolutely” was my response as I handed out probably a dozen or so copies of my list, all the while imagining the landslide of presents that was about to come my way.

But none of those presents happened. And I eventually discovered that nobody asking for my list had planned on getting me anything, they had just been entertained by the previous year’s list in the zine, and wanted this year’s list to read simply for the entertainment value it brought them.

Eventually the title of those documents changed from “Mike’s Christmas and Birthday List” to “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” with the original title now serving as a subtitle.

At present time, it’s been years and years since I’ve put together an actual Christmas list. Nowadays I just take a little bit of time in November and December to make sure that my Amazon wishlist is up to date.

Part of the blog post that I didn’t write this past Wednesday would have included stuff about how Amazon wishlists have become heavily utilized by content creators. (All content creators to some degree, but especially pretty young online sex workers who inform you that if you buy them some of the lingerie on their list, they’ll send you private photos where they model it for you.)

I’m not a pretty young online sex worker, but as a blogger I do create content, so in preparation for that post that never happened, I set up a brand new Amazon wish list under the name of the blog. Then set up a secondary non-Amazon wish list to request things that Amazon doesn’t carry.

TheAmazon List

Things to Get Me (the non-Amazon list)

So, if you feel the need to buy me a gift for Christmas or my birthday (again, December 23^rd), check out the above links for some ideas.

Christmas Decorating

I don’t typically do a lot of decorating for Christmas. Traditionally it’s pretty much just been the tree and the scene I’m about to describe. Every now and then I’ll put some holiday window clings in the window. But that’s about it.

Long ago, I decided that I wanted to set up a traditional Christmas-y scene. Like Santa getting ready for the Christmas eve flight. I had it all worked out in my head. Santa, standing in the front of the sleigh. The large sack of toys behind him. The eight reindeer hitched up ahead of him. Elves scurrying back and forth, loading up the sleigh with wrapped gifts. And Mrs. Claus standing beside the sleight to wish her man good luck on that year’s run.

But sadly, I had none of that stuff. No Santa. No sack of toys. No reindeer. No elves. No wrapped gifts. No Mrs. Claus. Not even the sleigh.

I did, however, have some things lying around that I could use as substitutes for most of the components of my holiday scene. I did have to buy a sleigh from Wal*Mart. They had a nice red wicker one that was only a couple of bucks. And I pressed my sister into service wrapping tiny little ‘gifts’ for me. (To this day, I’ve got no idea what most of those packages contain. I know that one of them was a dead AA battery. The rest? Could be anything.)

I had a Toys ‘R’ Us exclusive holiday action figure two-pack of Spider-Man and Mary Jane wearing glued-on fabric Santa hats. Ideal substitutes for Santa and the Missus. I’m sure that nobody would even notice that they weren’t the famous couple from the North Pole. Eight bison replaced the reindeer. Personally, I think that was a major upgrade. No Santa’s elves, but I had been buying up Star Wars Jawa two-packs like they were going out of style, so that took care of them. The sack of toys was my dice bag, still full of polyhedral gem dice. I curled a strip of paper to serve as Santa’s ‘nice’ list, and now everything was coming together perfectly.

Some cotton batting originally destined to become the internal organs of a quilt, and a couple of sheets of posterboard for a backdrop, and suddenly I had myself a Christmas scene. A Christmas scene that I would set up every year for nearly a decade.

While it never got set up while I was living in my brother’s basement, I believe that all of its component parts did make it all the way there. So if I ever finish cleaning my stuff out of said basement, I should be able to put it back together here in the apartment for Christmas one year.

The Nativity

Then there’s the Nativity scene to consider. Big traditional Christmas decoration. I’ve never set one up in my dwelling. Mom would set one up every year. Mom had been an Avon Lady at the right time to start collecting their white porcelain Nativity set. Avon would release a new piece or two to the collection each year from 1981 through 1993.

I’ve considered setting up a Nativity scene throughout the years, but never have for one reason or another. Not enough space. What I wanted was too expensive. There were always reasons not to.

After I had put together my Christmas scene with action figures and toy bison, I contemplated trying to assemble a Nativity scene using action figures. I didn’t have a full three kings or three wise men, but if I combined them I could use Marvel’s Doctor Doom and the Sub-Mariner (both kings of their respective kingdoms) and Splinter (known for his wisdom) from the TMNT line.

I would have used Venom and the second Spider-Woman as Joseph and Mary because their costumes matched, making them look (in my mind, anyway) like a couple. But also because I had a tiny little comparatively baby-sized rubbery symbiote accessory (also matching) that I would have placed into whatever I ended up using as a manger. But my Catholic raised subconscious kept nagging at me that it would be disrespectful, so I ended up scrapping the entire plan.

I’ve thought about building a Nativity using LEGO minifigures and animals, but I never got as far as working up any kind of design in my head for such a MOC. But I recently saw pictures online of a miniland scale (brick-build figures that stand about four inches tall) Nativity scene, and something inside of me declared, “That’s it!” So I will most likely try to design and build one along those lines for display before next Christmas.

The Christmas Tree

Two years ago, I set up a Christmas tree. (Artificial, due to allergies. And with built-in lights because I suck at stringing lights on a Christmas tree.) That was the first time I’d had a Christmas tree in probably fifteen years.

I set it up again last year, and about a week later the entire top half of the tree’s lights went dark. I fiddled with each and every light in that section, and nothing I did resurrected my pretty Christmas lights. So, I rode out the holiday season with only a half-lit tree.

In between last year and this year, I got a bookshelf and a clothing rack, and thus the space I’d been using for a Christmas tree was otherwise occupied. I had thought about the tree when I was eliminating that open space, and figured that even if I did get it set up and plugged in for the half of the lights that were still working, who knows how long those would last before burning out as well? So, I sadly decided to just go without a tree this holiday.

Fortunately, my sister came to my rescue by putting me together a very flat tree that would fit on the wall behind my front door. Ingenious! And creative. My Christmas trees used to be creative, way back when…

It started when I had a small (3 foot tall, maybe?) artificial tree that I decided to decorate with lights, the classic ball ornaments (in blue and silver), and Batman—the Animated Series action figures. Yes, that’s right. I had Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing, and most of their rogues’ gallery hanging from my Christmas tree that year. And atop that tree, his wings spread wide? Man-Bat.

Then a year or two later (this would have been about 1995 or 1996), I decided that I wanted an invisible tree. Oh, I still wanted visible lights and ornaments, but I wanted the actual tree itself to be unseen.

So, after buying all of the requisite equipment, my friend Michael Reinsch and I took a couple of days and installed an invisible Christmas tree in the corner of my room. It started with a hook in the ceiling and a bunch of small ring-hooks screwed into the floor in a circle. Then fishing line was strung from each ring-hook up to the ceiling hook. These lengths of fishing line we tied cheap wire ornament hangers into before stringing them up. Once we had the basic invisible cone-shaped ‘tree’ in place, we strung lights on the ornament hangers. And then hung ornaments from the wire between each light.

It was beautiful. Especially at night, with the room’s sole illumination being its lights. And it was also fairly unique. Then about five years later, I saw an advertisement for a tree-shaped cone of Christmas lights you could hang from your ceiling to have an ‘invisible Christmas tree’. (To this day I remain unsure whether I was pleased or irked at that development.)

Nowadays, the invisible Christmas tree is a trend. I asked my good close personal friend the Internet about invisible Christmas trees, and was shown a plethora of links to websites and YouTube videos, all of which explain in step-by-step fashion how you (yes, you!) can have your own invisible Christmas tree. Just like all your trendy friends.

Since nobody in their right mind would go through the process that Mike and I went through (please don’t point out the obvious conclusion to that statement) to get my invisible tree set up, the more modern tree is typically just ornaments on fishing line, descending from the ceiling in a spiral pattern at the proper lengths to suggest the tree in question. No lights. It doesn’t look bad. I just liked mine better.

My sister did the invisible Christmas tree thing for a couple of years in a row. (Not as her primary living room tree, but as a secondary tree in the dining room.)

The last of what I consider to be my creative Christmas trees was the year of the clothing rack. My grandmother had an old wooden folding clothesrack for drying her laundry. Which I decided would be the base of my Christmas tree that year.

First, I spray painted the entire thing green. (Which made my second-hand store owning Dad fly off the handle because I had ruined it with the paint and now he wouldn’t be able to sell it.) The next step was to completely encase the wooden frame in artificial pine garland (that I had gotten a bunch of on clearance right after Christmas a couple of years earlier, having no idea what it would eventually be used for). Wound around, up and down the sides, across the bars between each side, just generally making it look like it had overgrown the original rack.

After that I loosely repeated the process with strings of Christmas lights. Wound around, up, down, and across. Then came the hanging of the ornaments. Some on the bars, but most on either the lights or the garland.

The final touch was the Christmas tree topper. As this particular tree didn’t come to a point on top, none of the traditional options were in play. So instead, I cut some cardboard and laid it across the topmost layer of the tree, then used that long flat wide expanse to set up the traditional action-figure based holiday scene that year.

I had ideas for other trees that never came to be. If only I had been able to get ahold of a mannequin… I wanted a mannequin, and I wanted to dress it head-to-toe in camouflage – shirt, pants, gloves, socks, balaclava. Then wrap it in more of that magical pine garland, Christmas light strings, and then attach decorative ornaments everywhere I could.

I also kind of wanted to start amassing large quantities of cheap silk flowers and plastic greens (every time such things went on sale) for about a year. Then build a huge wire framework (something that was way beyond my skill level, so I’m not sure what I would have done had I actually made it that far in my plan), and then build myself a life-sized replica of the DC Comics character Swamp Thing (who is a plant elemental). And then, of course, cover old Swampy with lights and ornaments. Star up on top, presents underneath.

Who knows? If my health problems miraculously go away and I get a good paying job and move into a larger dwelling… maybe the era of the creative Christmas tree isn’t over quite yet.

Christmas Cards

I typically get about three Christmas cards a year. One from my Aunt Mary, one from my Uncle Tom and Aunt Sue, and one from my sister and her family.

I’ve only ever sent out Christmas cards twice in my life. The first time was in the early 1990s when I sent my nerd/geek friends Max Headroom Christmas cards (I’d gotten a box of them on clearance at Hallmark).

The second time what I sent out wasn’t actual Christmas cards, but rather a little story I had written. It took up two sheets of paper (green paper, for the holiday) with fairly small text, and told the real origin of Santa Claus. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the story. About how Santa was built out of the body parts of dead people by Dr. Frankenstein, following the mishap with his original creature.

This was a story that was originally told to my (at the time very young) sister while she was watching the Rankin/Bass “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” special. About halfway through the film I happen to wander through the living room where she was sitting on the couch, and after watching a few minutes of the thing, I turned to her and said, “You know that’s all made up, right?” She was of the age where she knew Santa wasn’t real, and told me that yes, she knew.

I then went on to explain, “Yeah, they made up that story so that little kids would enjoy it. But here’s how Santa Claus really came to be…” And then I spent about ten minutes spinning a completely ad-libbed and thoroughly bizarre story of Santa’s true origins. Then I rushed back to my computer to get it all down before I forgot any of it. As I said, it was my Christmas card that year, and ended up reprinted in the 93.5 Christmas Special the next year.

(That story was neither the first nor last time that I would have people telling me that I really shouldn’t be writing stories for children.)

Holiday Shenanigans, Walrus Style

I’m not the only one here in the apartment getting ready for Christmas. Cyrus is also getting into the holiday spirit.

You’d think that the Santa hat would be enough. But no, he also has to have the collar with the little jingle bells on it. Now when he wanders around you can hear him jingling. Jingle, jingle, jingle… That walrus is driving me crazy with all of the jingling.

Right now Cyrus is kind of upset that the Christmas tree my sister put together for me is lacking any kind of walrus perch where he can sit in the tree. With a standard Christmas tree, it’s very hard to keep Cyrus out of it. As my sister has discovered every time we come over to her house for the family Christmas party each year.