Still. It was disconcertingly still this morning when I got up. The hour was earlier than it maybe should have been, a product of an unusual holiday schedule at work. Instead of having an unofficial half day on Friday and getting Monday completely off, we had Friday off and were supposed to put in a “Skeleton Day” on Monday. For the people at my work who know enough about what they’re doing to answer phone calls from customers, that means they basically only needed to manage their phone shift (the part of the day where you accept new incoming support requests via phone, email or web sumbission).

For me, a guy who has no idea what he’s doing and, frankly, is pretty useless at the moment, I struggled to determine what I could do to put in my part of the Skeleton Day. My boss had suggested that it wasn’t necessary for me to come into the office. “Read some manuals,” he said. This morning I realized fairly quickly that while there were a few manuals to read, leisurely perusing technical documentation isn’t very supportive of the other team members who are actually putting in effort. I tried to get some kind of installation work done, setting up test suites for the new version of the product that my co-workers don’t have time to do. It’s educational and it makes me feel at least marginally useful. But alas, without proper VPN access or even a PC to my name, I cannot reach the test suite servers from home.

I don’t know why the world was so calm this morning. Eight-thirty doesn’t seem unreasonably early to me, but on this day it seemed like the whole State was sound asleep as I stared briefly out the window and onto the rain-soaked pavement below. Perhaps it was the recovery from the bustle of the Christmas shopping and family visits and travel arrangements and wound-up children taut with anticipation. It could be that nearly everyone else in the county had today off instead of Friday and all were taking advantage by sleeping in.

I turned away from the window and stared back into the apartment, filled with boxes and bags bulging and overflowing with an assortment of gifts and trinkets. It was a good Christmas, full of family and laughter and thoughtful gifts. In a true sense the oft-cited but rarely understood spirit of Christmas had been something I felt I could safely say was palpable. Whether one chooses to largely exclude the original message of the Christmas season or not—and regardless of my personal feelings on that matter—there is at least one set of ideals that those who try to glean a deeper understanding of the holiday beyond the greed and commercialism can identify and seek. The message of Christmas no matter the motivation remains: Peace, Kindness, Friendship, Joy and most importantly, Hope.

See, I think that whether you want to admit it or not, the message that the Christmas Story (no, not the one with Peter Billingsley, the other one, with the manger…) truly represents is that there is Hope. As people struggle to remember what it is to have Hope, the story of Christmas shows how Jesus came to bring Hope to a small family, to a town, to a people, to all people. Likewise as we try to capture the elusive Christmas Spirit and we ideally visualize a world of peace, where people do things—kind things, little things—for each other, no matter what or why but just because “It’s Christmas” and where we make a concerted effort to recognize the people in our lives that really matter and focus on how these tiny little shifts in attitude and attention can lead to joy and happiness for ourselves and those around us, I think people forget that the point of all that is to try and imagine what it would be like if people acted this way all the time, not just for a few weeks at the end of the year. That’s Hope. If we can do it for a little while, we wish—we Hope—it could last and last.

And when you get right down to it, the basic thrust of Jesus’s story and his message was (loosely paraphrsed), “Let’s all have the Christmas Spirit all the time.” What if Christmas wasn’t a special event? What if Christmas was just, like, Tuesday?

Religious or not, I think we could all get behind that.

Loot

So perhaps I finally sorta understand this whole gift-giving thing. No, I’m not getting all soft and squishy on you; I’m still a cynical jerk who thinks that too much of Christmas is fabricated by FAO Schwartz and the National Retail Federation, but I at least understand the appeal of giving gifts a little better this year. Receiving gifts has never been much of a problem for me except in that it has typically proposed an uncomfortable reciprocation circumstance that I don’t much care for.

And it really isn’t that I’m a cheapskate. Well, that isn’t the whole story. When it comes to money I don’t mind spending it on other people, but I dislike what I perceived as a sort of one-upsmanship type of game involved that, most likely (and this is confirmed by my wife) exists only in my head. But I’m delusional and socially crippled enough to stress out over it. What that means is that gift-giving becomes a proposition of cataclysmic proportions as I must find the perfect gift for everyone. The cliché “It’s the thought that counts” never meant much to me because I worried that if that was all that counted and I put maybe fifteen seconds worth of thought into someone’s gift, then what it really counted for was essentially bupkis.

Maybe things were helped this year by having Nikki do the lion’s share of the shopping. I made an effort to be involved in the process, both so that I could see how it was done by watching a master at work and also so I wouldn’t end up in one of those situations where I watch someone unwrap a gift intensely that I ostensibly gave them because I am as clueless as they are what it might be until they take the wrapping paper off.

But I still had my share of the duties and I was completely on my own when it came to Nik herself since she was incapable of offering advice or strategies. In the end I think I did pretty well on her and for once she didn’t seem to think I was suffering from a severe fever or some kind of brain trauma with my choices. Also, online wishlists are a beautiful thing.

Anyway, I think that by doing better and having a better attitude about the giving portion of gift exchanges I was able to enjoy the receiving element even more. Odd how that works. And this year I got a lot of really cool stuff:

• New Sharks Jersey. I have an old jersey, the original style with the lighter teal before they switched to the new style that also includes the all black third jersey. I opted for the home colors though, and it’s excessively cool. Nikki apparently had a hard time pulling this one together, enlisting the help of some friends and going through a series of tribulations that I can only hope my gratitude made worthwhile. It will be beyond sweet to wear this to the game I’m going to on the 5th of January (versus the Blue Jackets) for my birthday. It will be my first live Sharks game since a playoff game back in I think ’98.
• Shadowrun, 4th Edition. I started a Second Edition campaign a couple months back just as they announced this new update to the game. Third edition never really caught my eye but this one (which I’ve had a pseudo-legal PDF of for several weeks) looks very well done. So I put the campaign on hiatus until I can get everything updated for the new rules. It should get started probably around DunDraCon in February. Maybe even there at the con. Wouldn’t that just be fitting?
• Settlers of Catan. I played this game a bit online when MSN’s Gaming Zone had a free beta tryout. I finally got to play with Lister and Whimsy a week or so ago and it was as fun and addictive as I hoped. I was only a little bummed to find out that it takes at least three players which means Nik and I need to find some suckers friends before we can give it a shot.
• A Bluetooth Headset. Bluetooth is rapidly becoming my favorite feature of the new RAZR phone I talked about earlier. These bluetooth headsets look incredibly dorky (Doza is fond of calling them Star Trek communicators) but if it’s a choice between looking dorky and dying in a car crash… well, I don’t think too many people make the mistake upon seeing me that I’m anything but an utter nerd, so it’s not really an issue.
• New Cordless Phones. I’ve elucidated my ongoing offensive versus landlines many times. But this is the gauntlet being thrown. These phones (there is the primary one in the base station and then a secondary handset) are top-quality and probably cost more money than I would ever spend on something that plugs into a wall jack. This is the landline’s last chance, and I mean it. If these phones don’t work out, I’m ripping them out of the wall, I’m calling SBC and canceling my accounts and I’m setting up Skype and using cell phones from here on out.
• DVDs. I got a plethora of sweet movies to watch, including a very classy-looking boxed set of 16 Alfred Hitchcock movies from my folks, Shaun of the Dead, Underworld, Serenity plus the Firefly boxed set and the Looney Tunes Golden Collection. I also got a few duplicates that will have to be exchanged, but they were all movies I really wanted, it just turned out more than one person was on the right page.
• CDs. It was a big year for rounding out my Beatles collection: I nabbed Sgt. Pepper’s, Abbey Road and Rubber Soul this year. I also got the latest two System of a Down discs, Green Day’s American Idiot and Johnny Cash Live at San Quentin. Plus there was a $15 iTunes Gift Card in my stocking and an eMusic 100 free downloads card as well. Thus enabled, I scored Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, the newest New Pornographers album, Deerhoof’s latest, I finished getting the rest of Spoon’s Gimme Fiction, Pavement’s Brighten the Corners, Bad Religion’s No Control, The Casket Lottery’s Survival Is For Cowards and most of the latest from The Walkmen. Throw in a few assorted single tracks from Underworld, Bolt Thrower, The Killers, The Future Sounds of London and Gorillaz and whew! That’s a lot of music to get through and I think it has all but filled my 20 GB iPod.
• Of course there were loads of other assorted items: I got a Blood Bowl team from Nik (who braved the Geek Brigade at the Games Workshop store to get it); Alton Brown’s “I’m Just Here for the Food” from Gin (who drew my name in the family gift exchange); a Beatles T-shirt (told you it was a big year for the Beatles); Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”; a nice shirt for work and a Napoleonic wargame, among others that I can’t think of right now. That in no way suggests anything about the quality of those gifts, only the quality of my memory.
• Interestingly, what I didn’t get any of this year was video games. Granted I didn’t have many of them on my wishlist and they weren’t forthcoming when people asked around about ideas for me, but I think this may be the first Christmas in about 17 years that there were no video games involved. That’s not meant as a complaint, more of a curious notation.