Christmas Gifts That Keep On Giving

     My wife, the ever lovely Princess Consuela Bananahammock, is a real Christmas fanatic. In my home, Christmas carols play from Halloween through Valentines day. It is the last day of February, and I still have a few Christmas boxes that need to be put into storage. (I blame her, she blames me) 

    I must admit that it is also my favorite holiday. However, I have a strict rule that not a single Christmas decoration can go up until the day after Thanksgiving. I resent how Christmas gets earlier every year, and in my house we respect the bird!(Have you heard? It's the word!)

    Opening your Christmas gifts is the biggest moment for kids annually. As 'A Christmas Story' (an annual must for our family) says, "Lovely, glorious, beautiful Christmas,  around which the entire kid year revolved." I was no exception to that. I never slept well on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa come with frenzied anticipation.

I WANT AN OFFICIAL RED RYDER CARBON ACTION 200 SHOT RANGE MODEL AIR RIFLE!

    When it came to Christmas presents, my favorite part was always the stocking. I always thought it was like opening dozens of little presents all at the same time. When Consuela and I first got married, there was a bit of a learning curve for her. Santa just didn't spend as much time packing her stockings as he spent on mine. The stockings always come first, and they symbolize the start of Christmas day to me since I was a kid.

    As a child, the bottom of my stocking was always filled with peanuts. My mother said it was traditional, and something they all got in their stockings as children. When I was younger, I remember I used to think of those peanuts as wasted space for extra loot. But as I got older, I actually looked forward to the peanuts at the bottom, and now it is a memory I actually miss. (Isn't nostalgia weird?) 

    I tried one year to fill my own kids' stockings with peanuts. It didn't go well. My daughter, Princess Buttercup, wrote Santa a dozen letters the next year, and in every one of them she explicitly requested Santa leave her no peanuts this year.

    This last Christmas, my two wonderful kids pulled a 'Calvin and Hobbes' and woke us up at 2:30 in the morning ready to go. It took quite the tantrum from Consuela to get them back into bed, but eventually they fell back asleep until the slightly more reasonable hour of 6:00.

    

This was me as a kid. This is my kids now. Genetics.

    This last year, Santa Bananahammock left a bunch of Wish(the weird Chinese gadget website) gadgets in my stocking. (which is an amazing idea if you are looking for one) among them was a great little device called 'The Toilight'.

    The toilight is a motion activated light that clips onto your toilet bowl and illuminates it, so that you don't have to flip on the light in the middle of the night when you have to go. It cycles through eight different colors! At least, it is supposed to. I installed the toilight right away, because, well I just described how awesome this thing is.

    However, I could not figure out how to get it to cycle through the colors, and instead I got it stuck on 'Portal to Hell' mode. It was on all the time, not just motion activated, and it was a bright, crimson glow from the bowl. When you walked in to the bathroom at night, it did indeed look like a portal to hell had opened around the corner of the shower. The first night I saw it, I stopped dead in the doorway before I remembered I had installed it.

    I have since figured out how to set the motion activation, and it cycles nicely through the eight different colors. But once in a while I'll walk in to the bathroom late at night to a bright red glow and it makes me remember that first time with a smile. For now, I think I'll go browse the wish app.