Dave is…
Trying to cram a whole Christmas season into one afternoon.
Everything Christmassy has been ignored all season while I focused on finals. The closest I got to the Christmas spirit was the late night walks home from the library past the curbside tree vendors on 30th Avenue and passing out during late night showings of National Lampoons Christmas Vacation.
Now with the big day tomorrow, and our family’s traditional Christmas Eve focus I had to scramble to wrap my gifts and stick them under the tree to be unwrapped mere hours later.
But despite the crunch it was nice. A solid Christmas Eve dinner preceded by a toast. My old man has been saving a small thing of Scotch from mine and Max’s birth years for when we were all legal (and I guess he forgot about them this summer) so we cracked them open now. I liked it, but I don’t think Max has developed a taste for Scotch yet.
Then opened up some gifts. Highlight for me was getting a copy of The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, The Most Corrupt Congressman. the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Marcus Stern, whose daughter I met and befriended in a Bedouin tent in Morocco, and who my dad worked with at Copley News Service (see the story HERE but beware you need to scroll all the way to the bottom to find it). My old man got him to autograph it and he included an endorsement of the blog. That’s right; WhereDaveIs.com is now endorsed by Pulitzer winners. Awesome.
I was almost as excited about the gifts I managed to throw together when I should have been studying. Thanks to Aaron and his excellent Vines of Mendoza, me and Max got the old man some excellent Argentinean wine. I got my mom a throw blanket with a photo of my brother and I as babies on it, and my riskiest gift, a Max bobblehead.
I had to get it sight unseen but it’s not bad looking, though my dad observed that he had never noticed how much Max looks like John Denver. Credit to Paulie for introducing me to the idea and Gleanne for getting me the necessary headshots.
Not bad for an abbreviated holidy