Man Christmas

2023-12-26

It was the manliest Christmas ever. Not really, but some men did participate. For once, the guys really nailed this whole gift giving thing. When we put our minds to it, we can do anything. When we don’t think about it at all, we can do even more.

At my parents’ house, we have a gift exchange where we each draw names and buy gifts for one person. We also all buy gifts for my parents. We sort of owe it to them since they gave us life and then put up with all our nonsense for eighteen years. Actually, eighteen plus. If you ask my mother, my nonsense is most definitely still going on at the ripe old age of thirty-eight. My parents cancel out our generosity by buying us each presents beyond the gift exchange. They just had to one-up us with their altruism. Kind people are the worst.

My wife Lola handles the majority of our family’s gift-buying obligations, but I tackle the presents for whoever I have in the exchange plus my dad. I’ve met with mixed success in past years. If the person tells me exactly what they want, they will get precisely that thing. If they don’t tell me what they want, they’ll get a gift certificate to Blockbuster. I assume somebody still honors those things. Buying gifts for my dad is another story. He doesn’t particularly want anything and can’t provide anyone with guidance on what to get him. You just have to guess based on his two interests, birds and Bigfoot. You can’t go wrong with either one, unless you were to actually capture Bigfoot. The joy is in the search, not in the finding. If you currently have Bigfoot caught in a trap somewhere, please let him go.

Naturally, I waited until almost the last minute to buy my dad anything. Three days before Christmas at my parents’ house, I rolled through the local farm supply store to see what I could find. My first thought was to get the biggest bag of bird seed it’s legal to own. It would stop my dad from having to get his own refills for half of the year and would also let me show off how strong I am. He’d be super impressed when I lifted up that fifty-pound bag and promptly pulled a muscle in my back. Then I could spend the rest of Christmas on the couch complaining about how it hurt to move. Being an adult is exactly as fun as I imagined. When I got into the bird aisle, though, I realized I could do much better. They had all manner of bird feeders. There were small ones and big ones and ones scientifically engineered to attract certain kinds of birds and ones designed to destroy those birds with defensive lasers. Take your business elsewhere, grackles. I didn’t have the budget for any kind of bird feeder that required an electric outlet, so the lasers were out. I focused on my dad’s existing lineup of feeders to figure out where he was lacking. He has several of the standard kind, a few of the plastic hummingbird ones filled with red liquid, and one metal mesh seed holder shaped like a pig, which I might steal someday because it’s pretty awesome. If it ever goes missing, I’ll have to retroactively delete that last sentence. He also has some corn cob mounts for the squirrels, which aren’t birds but provide a similar level of backyard amusement. One year, we got him a spinning corn cob holder that sent the squirrels on a ferris wheel ride when they tried to eat. Nobody ever twirls me around when I sit down for dinner. I was born the wrong species. Since all of my siblings also know my dad’s only two interests, and since none of them were likely to make much progress on unraveling the mystery of Bigfoot, he was probably going to receive many bird feeders and bird feeder accessories. Mine had to be the best of all. Life is a competition, but only if I win. Otherwise, it wasn’t a contest in the first place.

The bird feed aisle had many bird feeders that offered simple, rustic charm. One feeder was a barn, which would have gone well with the pig. There were also several decorated like houses, which I found confusing. We wanted the birds to eat there, not live there. If anything, the feeders should have looked like restaurants. There was even one bird feeder disguised as a church. I almost pulled the trigger on that one. At the last minute, I realized it was too generic to be specifically Catholic. There was no way I was getting my dad a Protestant chapel bird feeder. If you want bird seed in his backyard, you better get right with the pope. I moved on.

Then, I saw exactly what I was looking for: the mega bird feeder. I don’t know the exact volume it could hold, but in American freedom units, it was somewhere between a barrel and a hogshead. In the metric system, that’s like two kilometers or something. I estimate it could have held twenty pounds of bird seed with room to spare. It had perches for eight birds to eat at once but could have accommodated dozens more if they grabbed onto the metal mesh with their creepy bird talons. It was big enough to feed not just the birds in my dad’s yard, but in all the neighboring ones as well. He could monopolize all aviary action for the entire city. He would become the crazy bird guy in the crazy bird house with the crazy bird feeder. Perfect. That lack of moderation is exactly what I shoot for in any gift. I bought the mega bird feeder, maxing out my gift budget with a single item. Then the store told me I had ten dollars credit because I buy pig pellets there so often. That dropped me back below the limit. My life-ruining decision to adopt mini-farm animals as pets paid off big time. I used the extra money to buy a fifty-percent-off Bigfoot Christmas ornament. He was wearing a Santa hat, which is how he stayed undetected for so long. He blends in with all the other St. Nicks this time of year. With a single trip to the farm store, I managed to cover one hundred percent of my dad’s interests. Clearly I would win Christmas once and for all.

My dad put a similar amount of thought into his gifts for me. I always ask for the same two things: alcohol and hot sauce. I’m a simple man, and I want for nothing. That’s not true. I want for everything, but I buy it all right away because I have poor impulse control. The time gap between when I want something and when I actually buy it is virtually zero. Delayed gratification is a four letter word in this house. When Christmas rolls around, I have nothing left to ask for, so I request alcohol and hot sauce since I need infinite refills of both. I don’t care about the type of either one, especially the alcohol. I’ve said repeatedly that all whiskey is pretty much the same. There’s whiskey and worse whiskey, and that’s it. It all does the job. It’s not like anyone drinks alcohol for the flavor, which I traumatically learned on my twenty-first birthday. I thought people downed the stuff because it tasted good. My first swig of Crown Royal corrected that misconception immediately. Since that time, my tolerance for terribleness has gone up and my standards have gone down. These days, I don’t see any reason to reach beyond the bottom shelf. This year, my dad called my bluff. It was set to be a very good Christmas.

We exchanged presents Saturday afternoon. Dad made his allotted budget stretch to four separate gifts for me. One was a hot sauce sampler pack, which is always appreciated. I look forward to applying that stuff to literally everything. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried hot cottage cheese. The other three gifts were all different kinds of whiskey. The smallest was a fancy bottle of stuff from Japan, the second was a large bottle of cheaper stuff from Ireland, and the final one was a jug with a handle from the good old US of A. I was obviously delighted by all three. I immediately opened all of them to share with the group. The most important part of Christmas is providing the open bar. That warmth you feel isn’t holiday cheer.

The men folk all accepted glasses of the first one. Most of the ladies demurred, having higher standards and functioning taste buds. I can’t imagine deliberately missing out on all the not-good parts of life. First, I poured the expensive Japanese whiskey. All the guys agreed that it was solidly okay. Next up was the Irish brand. It was even okay-er while also being cheaper, which made it the new champ. Finally, we went to the stuff with the built-in handle. You know it’s good if the distiller can’t even trust you to hold onto the container without a little extra help. It was the worst of the bunch, as expected, but not by that much. I would never decline a glass of it if somebody offered it to me, but then again, I don’t decline much of anything. I live my entire life like a “yes, and” improv skit, which is how I ended up with four kids, two pigs, and many, many delusions of grandeur.

We had tried all three bottles, but there was still a lot of daylight left. My Dad suggested that we dip into his personal supply. He rarely imbibes, which is why he gets excited when my brothers and my sisters’ significant others come over to give him an excuse. Then he has two drinks all afternoon and calls it a day. Apparently that level of self-control wasn’t hereditary. Nobody had that much to drink Saturday, but we still wanted to keep the tasting going. It was a matter of refinement and culture. It’s our job as men to better ourselves in all areas of our lives, including testing out our palettes. My dad has acquired quite a few bottles that we’ve left at this house over the years or given to him as gifts that he’s never touched. In short order, we had half a dozen different brands on the kitchen island. One of them was a hundred-dollar bottle sent via a special liquor delivery service a few years ago for my dad’s birthday. The delivery driver showed up at my parents’ house right after I arrived with my family, which was also the moment my sister’s dogs escaped from my parents’ yard and ran into the street with all of us in pursuit. It was three minutes of terror and cardio that I hope never to repeat. It turns out that whiskey was worthy of the chaos it helped cause. It was the whiskeyest whiskey that ever whiskeyed. What does that mean? It was potable and didn’t make anyone cringe. Did that make the good whiskey worth three bottles of the Japanese stuff (or ten bottles of the stuff with a handle)? Of course not. The fiscally responsible thing to do is to lean into the badness. High culture isn’t worth going broke.

Later that afternoon, Santa showed up. We had already finished our main gift exchange, but the man in red always makes an appearance anyway to bring a few extra trinkets for the kids. Even the ones who don’t think Santa is real get something, so everybody plays along. My children’s beliefs are for sale to the highest bidder. This year, Santa was played by one of my parents’ friends who none of the grandkids know. He was the first Santa who didn’t have someone blurt out his real identity. Obviously, he deserved a reward. I gave him a small sampling of the whiskeyest whiskey. Giving him the bad stuff would have been a one-way ticket to the naughty list. We wanted him to stick around and have more, but he needed to remain sober for a long night of driving the sleigh. It was a great Christmas all around. My only regret is that we didn’t try to mount the bird feeder. Six whiskeys in is always the best time to get out the power tools.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James