Christmas 2023 – Looking Back

“It’s like Christmas at the Kennedy Compound.” – The Simpson’s Movie

What happens if you hallucinate and see a psychologist?

I was going to write a story about one of my Christmas experiences, but instead I thought I’d write about more than just one.  Since my only boss at this blog is you, dear reader, I thought you wouldn’t mind.

So, for this Christmas, I’ll share some of the Christmas memories I have of my family while growing up.  Why?  Because those Christmas memories are the strongest in the young, but our understanding of Christmas as well as our experience of Christmas changes as we age.

The very first Christmas memory I recall as a child was of sneaking out of my bedroom, late at night on Christmas Eve.  As an adopted child, I might have been looking for firearms or an exit so I could exit if these adoptive parents wanted me to do chores or something.  Or not.  I was four.  Long after everyone had gone to bed, filled with excitement, I got up and headed towards the fireplace where I had been told Santa would be dropping off presents.  I recall seeing Santa, putting presents in the stockings, his back to me.  Or it might have been an alien.  I was four, so it was probably just a dream.  Or maybe Ma and Pa Wilder put something extra in my eggnog so I “slept well”.

That would have been an uncomfortable parent-teacher conference for them, “Hey, he’s thirty and in the fourth grade, but he sleeps well.”

Jeff Bezos doesn’t sleep naked – he sleeps with pajamazon.

The next year, when I was five, I recall that there were presents under the tree.  Of course, I was drawn to them like the Colorado Supreme Court is drawn to crack cocaine.  Being five and having the coordination of Joe Biden biking, I stepped right one of the presents that was meant for me.  The result?  My foot tore right through the wrapping paper, revealing to me what the gift from Uncle McWilder was. It was awesome:  a tool belt, complete with real tools including a flashlight, screwdriver, and metal pliers.  Immediately, I imagined putting the belt on and helping Pa Wilder fix things, like the sink.

Our sink had never been broken to my knowledge, but if it ever did break, I had a pair of real metal pliers and all the tools a five-year-old could imagine would be necessary to fix a sink.

We never did fix a sink, though I believe I did an unsanctioned fieldstrip of an Electrolux™ vacuum cleaner.  Note:  I still have the pliers.

I once bought a three-foot long ruler at a yard sale.

I don’t recall a particular present from first grade, but I do recall sitting at dinner.  Being an idiot, I announced to Ma and Pa Wilder (who I think had stopped drugging my food by now) that there was no Santa.  My brother, John Wilder, kicked me savagely under the table.

“Ow!  Why did you do that???”

“You idiot, now they won’t give us presents for our stockings!”

I’ve written about second grade before, here:

A Wilder Story, or, The BB Gun, The Black Bear, The Soviets, and Me

In third grade, we had moved to Wilder Mountain.  We were in a very small place while the rest of Stately Wilder Manor was still being constructed.  Ma Wilder decided to make wine, which involved really good, thick balloons.

My brother John and I decided to play a strange version of volleyball using one of the really thick wine balloons over the small pine tree Ma Wilder had made since we were living in a house the size of Hunter Biden’s sense of morality.  Good times.

In fourth grade my brother John Wilder was proven wrong, as my parents really went all out filling our socks.  In addition to several G.I. Joes®, my brother and I got wind up cars that, when they hit something, all of their body panels flew off.  I had no idea that kind of toy existed.  What was best?  The surprise.

What crayon is in charge of answering the phone?  Yellow.

In fifth grade my parents had said we weren’t going to get any presents.  It was part of a deal – they were going to buy some new snowmobiles, and because of the expense, those would be our Christmas presents.  To be fair I was fine with that – a snowmobile is just awesome.  But, my parents lied, and on Christmas Day we found lots and lots of presents under the tree.  What were they?  Boardgames, galore.  Everything from Mousetrap® to Clue™ to giant checkers.

The present I remember most from sixth grade was one from my brother – he got me the cassette version of Alice Cooper’s album, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.  An odd Christmas present?  Sure.  But I’ll never cry.

Welcome to my lunchline . . .

Seventh grade brought probably one of the most peaceful Christmas Days from my youth.  I recall on Christmas Day quietly doing a Star Wars™ jigsaw puzzle.  If ever there was a day where there wasn’t a single problem, no strife, nothing but a completely happy time spent with my family growing up, this was the day.

The biggest present I recall for Christmas in my eighth grade year was a Nerf® football, which my brother and I promptly took and threw in the driveway for hours on an unseasonably warm Christmas Day.

As a freshman, my brother and I were out shopping for Christmas presents for Ma and Pa Wilder.  One gift I saw was a towel.  It wasn’t just any towel, but one that had metal snaps and the Everlast® logo.  It looked like boxer’s trunks when you wrapped it around your waist.  This was the era of Rocky™, and I told my brother, “Man, that’s cool.”

He said, “Yes, it is.  I like it, and I’m buying it, for me.”  I was only slightly disappointed, since he had the money, and I didn’t.  Imagine my surprise on Christmas morning when I unwrapped his present to me and found . . . the towel.

I named my pet rock “Rocky” – not because it’s a rocky, but because it has trouble speaking.

When I was a sophomore, all the varsity wrestlers shaved our heads.  Why?  I have no idea.  We were in high school.  Ma Wilder took great amusement in this, and, for Christmas, she made me a knit hat in my high school colors.  The hat was ludicrously long, and perfect in every way.

My junior year was the last year that my brother was with us before he got married, so, in a sense, it was the last, close family Christmas.  Pa Wilder could see the nerd in me, and my present that year was an HP-15C programmable calculator that used reverse Polish notation (RPN).  Back then, HP™ had no equal.

My senior year, I recall that Pa Wilder gave me a metal puzzle – one that he had given all of his friends that year.  Made of brass, it wasn’t a hard puzzle, but I still have it, a memory of the last Christmas before college.

Going through this, it’s interesting (to me, at least) to see the changes over time as I moved from greedy excitement to looking for meaning and peace.  This year?  Not sure I’m getting a present at all, and I’m certain I don’t need one.  I’m also not sure if there’s going to be a Monday post, I’ll give myself permission to skip it if we’re having a good time here at Stately Wilder Manor.

I hope your Christmas is a wonderful one, and brings you peace and meaning as well.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

63 thoughts on “Christmas 2023 – Looking Back”

  2. Thanks so much for your humor and awareness – it is a gift that always lifts my spirits.

    A very Merry and Peaceful Christmas to you and yours, Mr. Wilder.

    Joe W.

    1. Joe, I think she’s on the mend, though back to the doctor tomorrow. She seemed better over the weekend. I hope your Christmas was great!

  4. Thanks for the great memories. I havent’ thought about the Crashmobile I got back then in decades (yes, the name is probably trademarked). Like you, yes, I remember the other great presents, but they are all associated with my parents and brothers and sisters–man, I wish I could time travel back to those days to be a kid surrounded by that loving family, again. Which I guess is a teaching moment. . Enjoy this Christmas with the people you love, who love you. That’s the best Christmas “present” you can hope for, so to speak. Thanks again and Merry Christmas.

  5. Thanks for writing this, your well described memories enabled me to mind-travel back to Christmases 1966-1977. We were pretty low on the ol’ money but my Uncle made sure my sister and I had some memorable Holiday mornings. About eleven years ago, I was glad to have reminded him of our gratitude to him for making a couple kids feel special over those years. He passed away a couple weeks after we chatted about that. I haven’t cared much for Christmas (No children) since growing up, but I notice I’m feeling a bit more about this season today. Thanks for the great read.

    1. My pleasure! Yeah, it was nice to take that walk back to see just how I’d changed as I grew. I’d write about my kids, but that’s really their story to tell.

  7. Merry Christmas friend. Love your family and ignore the nitwits doing stupid stuff for a while.
    They’ll still be there afterwards, trust me. Sigh.
    Michael

  8. O Holy night! The stars are brightly shining
    It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth
    Long lay the world in sin and darkness pining
    ‘Til He appeared and the soul felt it’s worth
    May your soul feel it’s worth this Christmas!

    1. Apparently Alice Cooper is the real deal. Recently during the “meet and greet”, or “shake and howdy” at our church, a friend of my wife was startled when the man in the pew in front of her turned around to greet her. It was Alice Cooper, in town for a concert. He said he always attends a local church on Sundays when he’s on the road. She said he quietly left at the end of the sermon, apparently to avoid attention.

      1. Alice went to church, incognito. When everybody rose, the Reverend Smith, he recognized Alice, and punched him in the nose!

        No more Mr. Nice Guy …

      2. Glad to hear this. I don’t think God is especially amused by the gender-bending name, however.

        1. I suspect the Almighty has a far broader sense of mirth than most folks of any stripe can even conceive.

          I Kings 18:27

  10. Sir,
    There is a feeling in the air, that this might be The Last Good Christmas, Pretty Much, until the current situation is resolved. There are so many things converging on this timeframe, and they all appear to reinforce the effect of each other, so we presume 2024 to become intolerably horrible as the months progress. Also, everyone is running out of money, or whatever they have been using in place of money, so there is that to look forward to as well…

    We have little kids, so since they are still in the skills-development phases we made sure to provide them with things that will stimulate those abilities. There is even a science kit that teaches outdoor survival skills…
    I got my wife a plate carrier, with IIIA plates and appropriate morale patches, ‘for when our choices become difficult’. She didn’t even bat an eye. No objection, no questions, no issues, and a bit chilling to be honest. We know waaaay too much for there to be any misplaced outrage, by this point, so I guess I should have known.

    I hope you & yours have a lovely Christmas, sir, and we wish you all the best. While we make ready to self-rescue, we can rest assured that we did our best with what we had.

    MinC

    1. Mike, my prayers are with you – it seems that Canada has gone turbo-crazy. I’m hoping we don’t follow . . .

      I hope your Christmas was wonderful.

  11. John, when I was young we would have a family gathering on my mother’s side at what was then the main house at The Ranch. This was something that had been going on well before I was born and the house was full of food and noise and relatives. My Uncle B would play the fiddle and my grandmother and her sisters would dance (sometimes with husbands, sometimes just together) as he played.

    Biggest Christmas Eve memories: Staying up until 0 Dark thirty reading Return of the King (5th grade) and the Christmas of my 8th grade year, when I got the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Boxed set.

    Merriest of Christmases, Friend!

    1. AD&D boxed set? With the cardboard press-out numbers instead of dice? (Watching The Two Towers right now)

      I hope your Christmas was great!

      1. Oh no Friend – We had the upscaled dice version with The Keep on the Borderlands as the module (B2, in case anyone cared).

        It was a good Christmas – quiet, but good. Taking the season in as I have no idea at all what next year will look like.

  12. Oh Holy night, the stars are brightly shining
    It is the night of our dear Saviors birth
    Long lay the world in sin and darkness pining
    ‘Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth
    May your soul feel it’s worth…Merry Christmas

  13. “my present that year was an HP-15C programmable calculator that used reverse Polish notation (RPN). Back then, HP™ had no equal.”

    Very funny but I wonder if anyone besides me got it.

    1. Oh, you’re not the only geek to get that one. I wore out my HP 45, but the 15C and the 41 are still going strong, and still have no equal.

      1. My HP 45 was not only worn out, but worn daily on my belt in a faux leather case that apparently repelled all the freshman girls on campus. I never got to take the rest of my clothes off until I eventually took that calculator off.

      1. I recall getting the 10c in high school and using it through college (physics, pchem esp). One feature I liked- I would put scotch tape on the back and write with 0.5mm pencil the damn formulas I thought I couldn’t remember.

        1. Heh heh! I had an HP-28S that I programmed to do inverse Z-statistic lookups for my statistics final. Finished in 10 minutes, got a perfect score plus the extra credit.

  14. I still have and use my HP-11C calculator. I’ve only had to change the batteries twice over the last 4 decades. I’ve used it so long I really don’t like using a “normal” calculator.

    1. I, too, still have my 11C, in fine working order. Back at the day job from which I retired, a software guy sold me his 15C. After a mere dozen years or so, it gave up the ghost — I suspect the bit monkey had mistreated it somehow. However, I found last year that you can get, for free, from the Apple app store, a perfectly functional HP-15C emulator that runs on your phone. (I bet the Google equivalent also has it.) That thing is photorealistic, too … the only thing it lacks is that sweet tactile keyclick feedback, plus the little silver square at the upper right that says “hp 15C” is just blank in the emulator, no doubt to keep the app writer from facing the Lawyer Wrath of HP. Solves the problem of occasionally needing a calculator when you’re out and about, and you don’t want to use that damnable thing with the equal sign.

  15. You remember each Christmas from your youth as individual, memorable events? Sheesh, I just have a single mash-up stashed in a mental folder labeled, “Christmas – The Early Years”. Whether I received that Start Trek Enterprise scale model at age 8 or 12 or 17 I have no idea whatsoever.

    Even later years with young kids are more or less a blur of obscenely early rises and endless application of decals. Every single toy and gadget, model and action figure diorama we gave the boys seemed to come with pages of sticky, slippery decals (they had to be soaked and slid off the cards and carefully dried in place in the olden days before the advent of modern stickers) which Dad, and only Dad, had the magic juju to wrangle. Despite seeing double and being woefully hungover from too much eggnog the eve before.

    Once the kids became not-so-young and had themselves graduated to grown-up aperitifs, we all agreed that sleeping in on Christmas morning was a luxury we’d all earned, so we did the gift-swapping the night before. If there was enough Old Panther in the ‘nog we’d be surprised all over again rolling out in late morning on Christmas Day to see the presents we’d completely forgotten we’d opened 12 hours earlier.

    Now that there are g’kids in the picture, it’s back to those obscenely early rises, but thankfully the decaling torch has been passed to a new generation of bleary-eyed Dads, and I just grimace in fond reminiscence.

    Here’s wishing a very Merry and Deplorable Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, the wife and the boys, JW. Keep the fires burning in 2024 and beyond, and be sure to take no prisoners.

    Cheers,
    TwoBuckChuck

    1. My Christmas was very merry and deplorable – a good time was had. 2024? We’ll take that bugger head on. I hope your Christmas was great!

  16. I remember my first Christmas Parade, cold wind on a cold sidewalk, and here comes Santa Claus, and candy canes are suddenly flying all around us, and Daddy reaches up to snatch one out of the air, and in one smooth movement he swings the candy down in front of me, and I take it from his hand, and in that frozen moment the grace and agility of his motion makes him a greater athletic hero to me than the greatest baseball outfielder that ever lived…

    …and I remember years later Mom and I flocking a tree in our garage with some kind of kit hooked up to our vacuum cleaner exhaust, spraying branches with fake snow that so rarely appeared in our Decembers, and spraying the walls of the garage with even more of the stuff, and ourselves, and even seeing the stuff stuck in the hairs of our noses and eyebrows, and laughing, truly laughing at the beautiful mess we had made, not truly appreciating that the beauty was in the laughter and not on the tree, for at a Christmas only a few years later there was no laughter at all when Mom took her own life…

    Merry Christmas, everybody! 🙂 Treasure each and every happy moment for the precious miracle it is.

  17. I, too, had an early HP45, got it in college because it had statistical functions and I was almost halfway through what wound up being three semesters of sadistics, and the 45, like the 15C, had no equal, either. Having embraced RPN for decades I am nearly unable to use an arithmetic calculator. I think HP made a big mistake dropping the 15C. I still have mine but do not use it often because once it dies there’s no replacement available, I do have a 48 but I could do without the graphing function. They are still making the 12C – the financial version – and someone gave me one many years ago so for simple tasks it works well, fits the shirt pocket exactly like the 15C, no stat or engineering stuff on it but it is handy at tax time. I did not know there’s a 15C emulator for the iPhone. I will get it immediately.

    As for Christmas, I remember several fondly, and the sharp break between “childhood Christmases” and “approaching adulthood Christmases.” No more toys or games, just “practical” gifts. No more Lionel trains, cars or track, but sweaters, coats and books. When my kids were growing up we put no small effort into kept the childhood Christmases because we knew those memories were important.

    Have a Very Merry, Mr. W and thanks for the trip down Memory Lane.

  18. Lots of good Christmas memories, but the one that I recall vividly was the year that the tree was decorated with foil wrapped chocolate bells. I think the idea was that we would get to eat the chocolate after Christmas. We quickly discovered that we could carefully open the bottom of the foil, the chocolate would drop right out, then we could carefully reclose the foil. By Christmas, every bell on that tree was hollow foil.

  19. John, my two biggest childhood Christmas memories are Christmas of 5th Grade, when I was up until 2 in the morning reading The Return of The King (First time), and the day of Christmas in 8th grade when I got the Advanced D&D Boxed set.

    Happy Christmas!

    1. The library didn’t have Fellowship, so I started at Two Towers. It worked out pretty well, starting right in the middle.

      1. I was the first post on this as well, of course. Stupid Interweb.

        I would argue the first parts of The Two Towers and The Return of the King were the best. At least as a young adult, the story about Frodo was less interesting to me.

        1. It was not necessary – as I finally got a copy, I was vaguely disappointed, and wondered, “Tom Bombadil – why???”

    1. I did take it off, and then asked my boys when they were going to start writing. They said, “I’ll think about it.”

  22. Hearty wishes for a Merry Christmas to you and your clan, along with a safe and (hopefully) saner 2024. I also appreciate the irreverent humor: it’s the teaspoon of sugar that makes the disturbing messages about our world circling the great porcelain bowl a bit easier to take. Oh, and the ‘Dad’ jokes too, AND the puns. It’s nice to know that at least one other person appreciates a good pun. 😉

      1. Yes, it was indeed wonderful. Having developed a grateful heart makes it so much easier.

  23. I must confess that my grandmother (very ominous retired schoolteacher music in the background) gave me a tool kit for Christmas when I was four. Hollow plastic toy hammer, saw and screwdriver. To prove how much better toys were in the 50’s-60’s I proceeded to bust the back window on dads first new car! Hmm, maybe I am the monster who turned my grandmother into a grump, anyway she stuck up for me keeping the other tools because ” what harm could he do with a plastic saw and screwdriver?”

    Again, toy tech has fallen a great way, I used the saw to cut the back leg off my mom’s teak end table.

    Wish I had that tool kit, but I still have the matching table.

    1. Ha! Sounds like an excellent kit! I was able to put the vacuum back together . . . and I will just say I’m pleased that houses have breakers.

Comments are closed.