I remember Christmas being a hectic time as a child. I would be rushed between several homes to quickly open gifts and then off again to the next (I know, life is hard right?). Well, things haven’t changed.

My wife and I have three homes (including our own) to spread ourselves out over from Christmas Eve to Christmas dusk and while the traveling is never more than 45 minutes away from our house at a time, the traveling and lugging packages tends to take its toll on one’s constitution.

But we made it and Christmas was a bonafide success this year giftwise. My son got everything he didn’t know that he wanted. My daughter is too small to even know or care what she got (but she appreciated it all immensely) and my wife was spoiled by my mother and me as usual (and like she deserves).

Me, I’m always spoiled.

  • I got Gears of War for the XBOX 360–the best game I’ve every played on the system thus far

  • I also received the XBOX 360 HD-DVD player which has 6x the resolution of normal DVDs and comes with Peter Jackson’s King Kong (it looks amazing in 720p, I could just imagine what 1080p looks like)

    Six Feet Under: The Complete Series Gift Set on DVD (this is arguably the best dramatic series ever on television and one of the few I consider to be a complete work of proper art)

  • And my wife gave me the best gift–the Easton Press first printing of Shelby Foote’s incredible trilogy The Civil War: A Narrative which has been sold out of its second priting now for a few months. I have been wanting to read this series since the second time I watched the Ken Burns masterpiece The Civil War on DVD when I got it for Christmas a few years back. Foote’s down-to earth method of speaking carries through into his writing and he conveys the entire lunacy of the Civil War in the guise of fictional narrative and he pulls it off in a way that even Michael Shaara doesn’t pull off (and I enjoy his books as well). These are a very valuable set of books and I will tteasure reading them (of course any series of books from The Easton Press are valuable and worth investing in if you’re a bibliophile like I am)

  • I got my annual desk calendar from my grandmother, a gift I always look forward to because it is one of the few gifts that really do last all year round. This year, she duplicated her success of choice last year with the “Word of the Day” calendar. I actually keep a list at work with my calendar of all the words I didn’t know from each day and go over it periodically, tryign to use them in context in a normal discussion

And I was a lottery winner this year, tacking in at $40 worth of scratch off victories.

Sure, Christmas in the richest nation in the world is a bounty of excess and a ritual of adding debts many of us can’t repay in a sensible time frame but there is still a lot of magic left in the world at this time of year and the proof of it is that there aren’t more deaths from “Wrap Rage” as parents try to un-twisty-tie the toys they bought for their children which whose packages were likely designed by a bitter lonely old man somewhere in Taiwan.

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