Big Daddy Paul

Forgive me, readers, for I have been conspicuously absent this holiday season.  Wanna hear why?

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: a boy who longer naps.  True, he is a grumpy asshole most of the time, but you gotta embrace each step kids make in their development.

Day 2: Two sets of grandparents.  Between the hacking coughs and the mountain of pills lying around the house, you’d think we operated a pharmacy.  We like our parents, but after five days straight of them, we resorted to a Catholic baptism to get out of the house by ourselves.

The next day we got three cups of coffee.  I used to only need 2 cups of coffee per day, but since I am going to bed late, waking up early, and running around crazily all day, I have had to step up my caffeine consumption.  I gotta believe that coffee is better for you than crack, though.

The next day we got four racks of lamb.  I like to both cook and eat, and I made some lamb chops that would make vegetarians think about switching teams.  I ate seven. Seven.

The next day we got five new printer cartridges.  I needed them because I had attempted to use cheap printer ink, and when I printed out our Christmas newsletter it looked like something Malcolm drew with crayons. Sorry our Christmas cards are late this year everyone. I like to make other procrastinators feel good about themselves.

On the sixth day of Christmas, we saw the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir sing on Christmas Eve at Slims in the city. They were amazing, and if you ever have the chance to see them, take that chance.  They are amazing and will inspire you to whatever it is that you need inspiration to do.

I had seven drinks on the next day of Christmas.  At least I think it was seven, it may have been more. Our friends, Marj and Tracy, throw a eve Christmas  eve bash every year, where we drink too much good wine, sing poorly and loudly, and eat some tasty food.  Thanks for the awesome tradition!

I followed this up with eight dishes at dinner at Christmas Eve.  As advertised, we went to Chinese food.  Mu shu, walnut prawns, fried rice, and best of all, wonton soup.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: nine stores on Christmas Eve morning. I waited an awfully long time this year to buy most of the presents on my list.  I knew what I wanted, and made it happen in a pretty efficient manner.  Wrapping them up the next morning was a bit painful though.

We got Malcolm ten presents. He has already stopped playing with them, and runs around the house with two old matchbox cars pretending their are his brothers and sisters.  Next year, he is getting a package of socks on the 25th.

The next day, it took eleven hours to open presents on Christmas morning.

It seemed like it anyways. We have very generous parents, who spend a lot of time and effort picking us up knick knacks on their journeys. When we finally finished opening our gifts, I couldn’t remember a single thing I had gotten.

Except for one thing.  The sweet new Macbook Pro Amy got me for Christmas.  It replaces the PC that took about 12 hours to do anything on.  This bad boy turns on in three seconds, has amazing graphics, and currently sleeps in the bed with me.  I love it, and it will show.  My blogs are gonna be better, faster and sleeker this year, and you can thank Amy for that.

To all of you out there, thanks for reading my blog and I hope that the new year brings you peace and prosperity.  Or, at least some decent chinese food.

The holidays are a special time of year to expand our waistlines, prop up the Chinese economy through the purchase of massive quantities of cheap plastic crap, and pretend that we are not bad people by buying our loved ones “thoughtful” gifts.  Perhaps the best part of the holidays are the fact that we do the same things every year, ensuring a little consistency from one year to the next.  So take a walk down memory lane with me to discover what it is I like about this time:

1. Christmas music.  This is undoubtedly my favorite part of the holidays, and one of my biggest character flaws.

I get a lot of these looks during the holidays

I listen to Christmas music pretty much non-stop throughout December and it drives everyone around me nuts.  Oh, of course I try to be cool and listen to rock and roll versions of the holiday classics, but that thin veneer melts away when you see me belting out “Oh, Holy Night” by Jewel when I’m in the car driving to the store.  This also presents an interesting opportunity to see my singing about God and Jesus, whom I normally don’t reference except in conjunction with the words, “Why have you foresaken me?”  during Raider games.

2. Drunken Christmas.  The one family event I do every year is to go to my Aunt and Uncle’s house in December with my parents, my aunt and uncle and their close friends.  We call it drunken Christmas because we have typically consumed a couple glasses of champagne and a vodka gimlet/manhattan or three within 30 minutes of walking in the door.  After we are good and lubricated, we make inappropriate sexual references about one another and then sit down for a full turkey dinner.  All this drinking is dangerous, as people have passed out at the dinner table, locked themselves in the bathroom for hours to throw up, and, one year, we had to call my dad an ambulance after he fell and hit his head in the driveway after falling asleep in the car.  It’s dangerous alright, but like eating at a buffet, the danger is part of the allure.

3. Holiday Movies.  Everyone has their favorites and I am no different.  Right now, I am partial to Love Actually, and watch it every year, usually with fresh snickerdoodles straight from the oven.  I will usually get roped into A Christmas Story once, and when Amy is not around I will look for Scrooged. Amy and I watched Bad Santa one year, but there is a scene in it where the mom in the Gilmore Girls has risque sex with Santa Claus.  Amy loves the Gilmore Girls and won’t watch it for that reason, but I am pretty sure that she doesn’t know about the copy I have hidden in my sock drawer. Please don’t tell her.

4. Won Ton Soup on Christmas Eve.  My dad used to be a minister, so Christmas eve was pretty booked.  We did, however, carve out some family time by enjoying a quick meal at a local Chinese restaurant, one of the few non-fast food places open on holidays. Nothing cheesy, no groups of waiters singing “deck the halls with bows of horry, fa ra ra ra ra, ra ra ra ra.”  Just a time for all of us to be together and have my dad lecture us on the perils of peeking at our Christmas presents.  I still crave won ton soup on Christmas eve, and this year we are heading to Chinatown in SF to all share a bowl of soup together.

5. Stressing about New Year’s Eve.  The only thing that separates Amy and I from the depth of lameness is my desire to actually be awake at midnight on New Year’s Eve.  She doesn’t share my obsession to differentiate ourselves from our parents (who are all asleep when the new year presents itself), so I have to fight the battle on two fronts.  I have to find something for us to do every year, and then convince Amy that it is actually worth doing.  Usually the plans fall pretty flat, involving the words “Trivial Pursuit” and “It’s only Ten O’Clock?”  I am supremely jealous of friends that have established plans during the New Year’s Eve, and even more outraged that they keep denying my requests to join them. (If you are out there and reading this, please invite me to your New Year’s Eve party.  I’ll bring the Christmas music, and chances are pretty slim that you’ll need to call an ambulance for me at the end of the night.  Who could ask for more?!)

That’s us, what do you do for the holidays?

We adopted a family this year, and this means I have been out shopping for them this week.  I say this, not to brag about what a great person I am, but to explain what I was doing in the little girls bra and panties section in Target, in case any of you saw me there. Armed with a wish list, a credit card that was declined not once, but twice due to the flurry of activity and holiday good cheer, I set out to make someone’s Christmas just a wee bit better.

Shopping is challenging for me because I am alone.  While it is nice to have fellow holiday shoppers out there with me, they tend to smell of beef log and don’t seem to care all that much about my fantasy football team, both of which make them undesirable to talk to (or even stand next to in line.)  To mitigate my feelings of loneliness, I found myself having an internal dialogue with the people I was out shopping for.  The conversations were interesting because I have never met them and know little of them except for their wish list.  Of course, since they weren’t actually present for the conversation, I felt free to be as mean and condescending as I possible.  Here are a few excerpts:

“Wow, the only sweatshirt they have in XXL, Michael, is black.  It’s too bad, because the other [smaller] sweatshirts are way cooler.  Maybe if you didn’t eat at McDonald’s so much you wouldn’t be so fat and you could look cooler.”

“Chris Brown, Esmerelda. Really?  He beat up his girlfriend!  Why not listen to someone a little more wholesome?  Paul Simon.  There you go, I think he is battery-free! Oh, this is going to a very special Christmas indeed!”

“Darryl, you asked for a XBox 360?  I don’t even have one!  Next year set your sights on something more realistic.  This year, to punish you, I buying you a My Little Pony.”

“Sorry, Daniel, I just can’t buy underpants for another man.  I don’t want you thinking of me every time you put them on.  Please enjoy this modest gift card.”

“You’re a 5T at one year old?  God I hope your mom filled out the form wrong, because if not, you are the be the biggest baby in the whole wide world.  Somebody call the Today Show!”

And so it went, me walking around the store shopping for toys for boys and girls, tool sets for dad, and trying to find clothes for the infant version of King Kong Bundy.  It was a long day, but enjoyable nonetheless.  I even brought Malcolm along for 3 hours of shopping to teach him the true meaning of the holidays. To his credit, he learned to not give people what they want, but rather what you think the should want.  He learned to accept people for who they are, but criticize them endlessly when they are not around.  Perhaps the most important lesson of all, he learned to avoid people who smell like beef log.  And that, my friends, is what the holidays are all about.