Only the nose knows

In fourth grade I sat next to this girl named “Lucinda.” I’m giving her an alias so that I may mock her gleefully.

Lucinda loved my cartoons. While the other kids in class were hard at work practicing their penmanship and perfecting the ultimate spitball, I drew cartoon characters with grotesquely exaggerated features -- drooping eyes the size of bowling balls, mouths that could chomp the legs off a meerkat. One day, as I was toiling over various creations, I concocted a character with a nose so outlandishly huge it could double as a flotation device in the event of a transatlantic plane crash. It was shaped like a bratwurst and boasted a set of nostrils that dwarfed the wintertime dwellings of hibernating black bears.

At the time I had no idea that I’d still be drawing him a quarter century later.

Looking back, I have Lucinda’s obliviousness to thank for this. She wasn’t what you would call the swiftest boat in the fleet. Every day I would doodle and sketch an assemblage of random faces, horrid monstrosities who looked as though they had mutated in a vat of radioactive sludge. Every day Lucinda would glance at my notebook and ask, “What’s this character’s name? What’s that character’s name?” Always with the vapid stare of a lobotomy patient.

None of them had names. I told her this repeatedly. They were random, I insisted, nothing more than stream-of-consciousness distilled in pictorial form. She never internalized this information. As an overweight child with Coke-bottle glasses and a high-pitched squeal of a voice, I should have been thankful for any female attention I could get; even then it was clear my most trusted companions throughout adolescence would be a Nintendo controller and a bag of fun-sized Three Musketeers bars. But my nerves were starting to fray, Lucinda’s golden locks be damned.

So when I drew my big-nosed goofball and she asked me what his name was, I studied my sketch for a second.

“Nerdy Nose,” I said. “His name is Nerdy Nose.”

It was an easy enough name to conjure, if a little uncreative. He was nerdy-looking and he had a big nose. Nerdy Nose. Simple. As a naming strategy it had all the sophistication of looking at a crimson-bottomed snow monkey and calling it “Red Butt.” I spat it out primarily to get Lucinda off my back, but something strange and a little miraculous happened: It stuck. The simple act of naming him -- combined with his unique look -- gave him a kind of life, and before long I was getting requests from classmates to draw Nerdy Nose on brown-bag book covers, on notebooks, on soapy-smelling forearms. I felt like a rockstar, only I wasn’t riding a cocaine high and biting the head off a bat.

I still draw Nerdy Nose to this day, and with some regularity. He turns 25 this year.

Image drawn in Mario Paint, 'cause I'm that good.

Curious how we often define ourselves by our creations. Not that I would ever compare Nerdy Nose to iconic cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny or Scrooge McDuck, but surely they’ve become an everlasting part of the illustrators who drew them. Matt Groening will forever be trailed by the shadow of Homer Simpson; Jim Davis and Garfield are as interconnected as a parent to his or her child. Orson Welles has become synonymous with “Citizen Kane,” Michelangelo with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. At some point the creator and the creation become indistinguishable.

This isn’t something that’s limited just to traditional “art,” either. Maybe you build a house and come to think of it as your baby. Maybe you rebuild the engine to a classic car, or are known throughout the community as a master knitter of epically awesome scarves. Whatever it is, there’s something in most human beings that needs to be externalized, made permanent. Corny as it sounds, I think it’s spurred by an innate sense of mortality. We want to leave a trace, carve “I was here” into the tree bark while we can still hold the knife.

The same subconscious drive that inspired cavemen to draw bison on rock walls also spurred Kool and the Gang to write “Jungle Boogie.” That’s some wild, wacky stuff.

On a remote island in Indonesia is a site called Maros, home to some of the earliest known cave paintings ever produced by human hands. They date back about 35,000 years. Not surprisingly, these paintings depict animals, which makes sense when you consider that animals and geological formations were about the only subject matter available at the time -- no teapots or cityscapes, no frilly dresses, no melting clocks. There’s no residual evidence suggesting that these were dwellings, which means the paintings were just kind of left there, like an “I was here” message scratched painstakingly into the wooden bench seat of a picnic table.

Given the available technology and creature comforts of the time, it’s hard to know what would constitute evidence of a “dwelling.” The decomposing shells of La-Z-Boy recliners? They wish. But if it’s true that the site is more art installation than abode, that means the yearning to make a mark is quite literally prehistoric.

Which in turn means that all of our little creations, our mittens and folk songs and Nerdy Noses and Tweety Birds, are part of a lineage that stretches back before recorded time.

Whoa. Think about that the next time you bang out a doodle of a talking cow.

I don’t expect to ever run into Lucinda again, but if I do, I’ll have to thank her for unwittingly inspiring my inner caveman; she may never know the role she played in spawning my own humble mascot. Annoying at the time, perhaps. But 25 years later, it sure seems worth it.

Scout's dishonor

Note: Here's a column I wrote for the Journal Tribune last year, and forgot to tack up here. Consider it a "lost essay," only not lost, and an essay just barely. Enjoy!

 

In a way, I’m glad I was never a Boy Scout. I’m sure it’s a fine organization once you get past the chipmunk-colored uniforms and the homophobia, but there’s something about wearing a maroon ascot that’s a little too jolly for my tastes. I’d always feel like I was a pointy hat and a pair of leggings away from being one of Santa’s elves.

 

They have a good motto, though: Be prepared.

 

That’s what I’ve kept in mind while making a list of things to pack for my upcoming trip. For the next several days, I’ll be on a cruise ship bound for Bermuda, and the challenge now before me is to select which belongings to bring, while not toting anything that I’d mind being stolen by a preteen pickpocket in Oliver Twist garb. In my mind, every pickpocket looks like Oliver Twist and smokes Camels with a cigarette holder. Pretty sure that’s the uniform.

 

Human beings have this funny way of being attached to the objects they’ve amassed. As traits go, it’s fairly unique among creatures of the animal kingdom; bears don’t line the walls of their cave with ceramic cats and birthday cards, and rarely do you see a beaver sporting a shiny leather carrying case for his iPod. When you do, it’s usually a peyote hallucination.

 

People stand out in this regard – especially Americans, who have been conditioned by centuries of capitalist impulses to define themselves by their possessions. Our attachment to material things is rarely more evident than when we’re cobbling together trip accessories. Does one absolutely need to bring along that lucky cow skull discovered while riding a knock-kneed camel through the Australian Outback? Most certainly not, but there it is anyway, stuffed tight into a suitcase next to the fishing magazines and monogrammed toenail clippers. Its name is “Betsy” and guarantees you a winning hand at blackjack, according to legend.

 

Not to pull the curtain back and reveal all my tricks, but I typically bang out these screeds a few days in advance. By the time you read this, I’ll already be on the boat, assuming customs doesn’t stop me for carrying aboard a fossilized animal head. Right now, however, I’m sitting in a room making a list of essential bring-alongs. It’s like a who’s who of my stuff – essentials I can’t survive without for the duration of even one week.

 

Now right away, that’s something which sets me aside from the cave dwellers. Fifty-thousand years ago, the very concept of “essential items” would have seemed alien. It was the era of the woolly mammoth, so the only real must-have portable possessions were basic clothes, hunting implements, and the body’s own vital organs. As long as you had a spear and a spleen you were pretty much all set. Never did a Neanderthal plan a vacation and make a packing list, and especially never did he carry around a suitcase crammed with Cabana shorts and citrus-flavored Binaca breath spray.

 

We modern humans surround ourselves with various acquisitions – stereo systems, bath towels, shot glass collections and ear wax removal kits – and when we travel, we whittle these things down to an appropriate scale, our life in microcosm. We decide, more or less on the spot, what’s extraneous and what’s not. I can go for a week without the Ninja Turtle action figures lining my windowsills; they’re decorative (literally window dressing), and taking a break from them might actually make me feel like a real, live, adult man. I can’t, however, go a week without any implements for trimming my nose hair. Otherwise it looks like my upper lip is being attacked by a pair of giant paintbrushes. At some point, without my knowing, this became an important enough accessory to bring halfway across the Atlantic.

 

Sunblock will prove to be an essential item, especially with my skin. My pigmentation is so white that it mirrors the pristine glow of a faraway neutron star – which is great for pretending I’m sick, but no so much for spending any amount of time beneath a subtropical sky. In about four seconds I brown like a piece of toast; left unprotected, I burn up in about the time it takes for Barry Manilow to sing “Copacabana.” Tossing the Banana Boat SPF 30 into my carry-on bag is an easy call, but again, it’s hard to imagine a caveman looking up at the sky and thinking, “Hmm, it’s a long walk to the saber-toothed tiger’s watering hole. I’ll get crispy if I don’t lather up!” If present-day materialism has taught me anything, it’s that the human race has collectively evolved into a bunch of weenies.

 

Odd how we rarely examine our attachment to physical objects until we’re forced to go without them. For better or worse, our identities are tied up with our things – our favorite armchairs, our grandfather clocks, our frosted beer mugs etched with the likeness of Rita Hayworth. All of these things in aggregate may not equal a life, not quite, but they do provide a backdrop for one.

 

Let’s say the human race goes extinct sometime in the next few hundred-thousand years. (Not inconceivable.) From the ashes of our once-great global civilization arises a new, intelligent species: Giant otters with enlarged brain cases. These super-smart otters develop their own culture with their own vocations, and one day, an otter becomes a paleontologist and examines the ruins of your former home. He’ll learn a lot about you from what he discovers there. From your DVD collection, he’ll know that you enjoyed French war movies and, randomly, season six of “Cheers.” From your toiletries, he’ll know that you were obsessive about controlling armpit odor, and apparently had a difficult time quelling those itchy rashes.

 

Then he’ll stumble upon your suitcase. Recognizing it as a travel item, he’ll determine that its contents were the most important possessions in the world to this now-extinct human: a Super Mario beach towel, a Fodor’s Guide to Papua New Guinea, and a weathered deck of Star Trek playing cards.

 

Brow furrowed, our brainy otter will roll out his clipboard and jot down the following: “Definitely a nerd. Has all the hallmarks of either a sad recluse or a serial killer. Could have been both. Pretty well prepared, though. Must have been a Boy Scout.”

 

What's in a name

At the bathroom where I work, the toilet lids are made by a company called Sexauer. I’m not okay with that.

Obviously the good folks at this fine crapper supply company didn’t name themselves “Sexauer” to intentionally gross people out. If that had been their goal, they would have called their outfit “Poopums,” or “Take a Whiff!” But I have a very strict rule that I just now invented: No piece of porcelain on which I take my morning constitutional should have the word “sex” written on it. Sex should be connoted with nice things -- rose petals and bubble baths and the like -- not a bathroom stall that smells like it’s in the flamingo habitat at a petting zoo.

By all measures, it’s a perfectly fine toilet seat. (Although who could tell?) It’s just the name that’s unfortunate.

Good products can sometimes be doomed by bad names. Look no further than Hydrox for proof. Anyone remember Hydrox? If you’ve ever had an Oreo cookie, then you’ve basically had a better version of Hydrox that also is not named Hydrox. The cookie-filling-cookie configuration is so similar that only subtle variations in flavor and texture distinguish the two brands. And yet Oreos effectively drove Hydrox out of the market in the late 1990s. A lot of people thought Hydrox was a cheap knock-off, but it actually debuted first, in 1908, whereas Oreos hit shelves in 1912.

Hydrox was just reintroduced to the market this past September after a 16-year absence, but now it’s basically a nostalgia item, available only on Amazon and in the panic rooms of wild-eyed end-timers. It’s amazing the brand was revived at all. I mean … “Hydrox.” It sounds like bleach. Might as well dunk each cookie in a bucket of Clorox and be done with it.

You don’t have to be a marketing expert to know that a brand name should sound appealing to the consumer.

Yet astoundingly awful monikers abound. Granted, many of these terrible brand names are for products sold in foreign countries; shoppers in Thailand, for instance, may not immediately recognize how disconcerting it is to buy a bag of kitty treats called “Frenzied Cat Meat” (a real product), or a case of bottled water called “Zephyrhills” (also real). But some names are just too wacky, gross, or outright shocking to merit any kind of excuse.

The following are totally real products being sold somewhere on the planet Earth as we speak: an ice cream called “Asse”; a beverage called “Pee Cola”; “Lemon Barf” laundry detergent; “Boudreaux’s Butt Paste”; “Colon Cleaner”; Starburst hard candies named “Sucks”; “Only Puke” soup crackers; “Golden Gaytime” ice cream bars; and the topper, pork on a stick called “Mr. Brain’s.” And those are just the ones that can be printed. Maybe.

You’d have to be trying pretty hard to make a worse first impression with consumers. Maybe there’s an underground club of company CEOs and marketing executives secretly trying to tank entire product lines. We may be on the verge of seeing sports drinks named “Captain Booger’s Jock Phlegm,” or craft beer with a label reading, “Imminent Liver Failure.” Actually, I’d probably drink that one.

Perhaps these seemingly hapless companies deserve our sympathy. After all, it’s really only been over the past 100 years or so that corporate brands have emerged as national and global entities. In 1900, it was inconceivable that developed landscapes in first-world locales would be pockmarked with Coca-Cola billboards and star-bright storefronts proudly displaying Nike’s trademark “swoosh.” Heck, in 1900 you didn’t even buy Nike shoes. You killed a beaver and tied its skin to your foot with baling twine.

Most companies that existed back then were local, so names were less of an issue. All you had to do was call your product something that appealed to those consumers living within a 10-mile radius of your “headquarters,” which was probably a small downtown shop with at least two elderly gentlemen playing Canasta at a corner table. It could be the goofiest product name in the world, and it would sell because it fulfilled the needs of the local populace -- “Tim Crotchhugger’s Miracle Toothpaste” or something. “Asshat Acne Cream.” And so on.

Look at what’s happened in the intervening century. Nothing’s local anymore. The common plea of “Buy local!” arose because buying local is becoming almost impossible; civilization has rapidly shifted from isolated pockets of people to an interlinked web of communications and commerce. Names matter more than ever, because it’s exponentially easier to expose a product to a national or global audience. The world is the new downtown shop, and old men are playing Canasta by the millions.

Which means “Lemon Barf” probably isn’t going to capture a large slice of the laundry detergent market. Wild guess here.

Look at various industry leaders and you’ll see catchy appellations that are snappy, simple, and stick in one’s brain. Snickers, a candy bar that sounds as delicious as it tastes. Pringles, forever associated with packaging its chips in cardboard tubes designed for tennis balls. Wranglers, which sound like denim jeans worn by men who kill bears with their hands. Those are names, dammit.

The Sexauer people are lucky in a sense. Unlike candy bars and soda, toilet seats are an essential product, and there can’t be too many companies out there making them; there’s not enough variation from one seat to another to justify a lot of market competition.

That doesn’t mean I have to be comfortable with it. Fortunately I don’t have to look at their logo very much since I’m generally sitting on it. That helps. It allows me to envision what a toilet seat would be called in a world where gross doesn’t exist, and eyebrow-raising nomenclature is but  a fantastical dream.

“Bob’s Butt Clouds.” Just imagine the luxury.

I hereby resolve...

Alright, I guess it’s inevitable. Time to make some resolutions.

It’s been forever since I’ve done this. Years of my life have gone by with nary a resolution made, and for one simple reason -- I’m awesome in every way and can’t be improved upon.

OK, resolution number one: Stop lying about how awesome I am.

The real reason I don’t typically make them is because the whole endeavor seems a bit artificial. The dividing line from one year to the next is arbitrary, a divvying up of time into digestible chunks that’s invented wholly for human convenience. Trees, trucks and snow leopards can’t tell the difference between 2015 and 2016. People follow the calendar because otherwise we wouldn’t know when to show up for work or paint Easter eggs, and we’ve been doing this for so long that when we switch from one year to the next, it feels somehow momentous. We think change is about to happen, when really, change is all there is.

So I stopped making resolutions a long time ago, figuring that if something had to change, I’d just change it, and not wait for Carson Daly and his light-up Times Square ball to give me the green light. Still, sometimes you procrastinate, and items on the to-do list start piling up. For this reason, I’ll grit my teeth -- resolution number two, stop gritting my teeth -- and make a few resolutions. Let the record show that I’m all pouting and childlike.

Resolution number three: Stop being all pouting and childlike.

See why I don’t make them? There’s a hat-trick already, and the engine’s still warming up. Conveniently, though, this does smooth the way for resolution number four: Start eating better. Oh, this is a common one, I know, prompted by holiday binge eating, which in turn is inspired by good cheer and merriment --  to say nothing of the easy availability of four-foot long chocolates shaped like alien probes. It’s perhaps the most common promise that people make to themselves around the turn of the new year, but now it seems especially pressing, considering my belt’s run out of loops and my pants could be used as a tourniquet on the severed limb of a samurai.

Healthy people, you see, consider food to be the body’s fuel; sane, pragmatic options like apples and chicken are eaten to provide nutritional energy, which is then used to power everyday activities, like walking and playing “Gangster’s Paradise” on a banjo. I aspire to this type of approach. Mostly I succeed, since the only edibles I keep in the house are bread, eggs and Cocoa Puffs (for the iron, of course). But then the holidays come around, and my Spartan dining options are supplanted by foods that clog the arteries faster than a woodchuck farts in springtime. Bread is replaced by candy canes, eggs by chocolate Santas, and Cocoa Puffs by actual cocoa. So yes, time to start eating better. And walking farther than the nearest 7-11.

Resolution number five: Stop chewing so much gum. It started innocently; stick a couple Wrigleys in your yapper and it’s like a stress ball for the mouth, an outlet for all kinds of pent-up energy. Plus it makes your breath smell like a spring meadow filled with blooming daffodils (with a faint undercurrent of garlic sauce and whiskey). The habit can easily get out of hand, though. One stick at the beginning was fine, but then the cravings set in -- for two, three sticks at a time. When I hit four sticks I knew something had to be done. With a minimal amount of gum in your mouth, it’s easily concealable and not outrageously offensive, though you probably don’t want to do it during a board meeting or make-out session at the drive-in. With four sticks, it looks like you lost a bet and had to stuff an entire coconut into your jaw.

Speaking of coconuts, resolution number six: Eat more coconuts. For some reason I can’t shake the false notion that I hate them; whenever I eat one -- or, more commonly, taste it somewhere in a candy bar -- I’m always surprised by the fact that I like them. You’d think with all this eating experience I’d have a better handle on what I enjoy, but I’m apparently incapable of learning that I love coconuts, hate hot dogs, and writhe in digestive pain whenever I come within a half-mile radius of any powdered doughnut. If I ever discover a coconut-flavored hot dog doughnut I think my head will explode.

Resolution number seven: Develop a regular flossing habit. I floss in spurts, and when it happens I feel a sense of accomplishment completely out of proportion to what I’m actually doing. My pride rivals that of a physicist unlocking the deep mysteries of dark energy; it’s a pretty harsh comedown to realize I’m just clearing out old popcorn kernels. This of course will cease to be an issue once I switch to an all-coconut diet.

And finally, resolution number eight: Don’t sweat the little things.

That means different things to different people. For me, it means not obsessing over trivial matters, like whether people like me, or tripping over my own feet during the Texas Two-Step. Life is a fleeting moment; it’s shameful to expend energy fretting.

So here’s a final resolution: By this time next year, I shouldn’t have any resolutions at all. With my feet propped on a leather ottoman and a cigar dangling from the corner of my mouth, I’ll look back at the year that was and say, “Well, that’s pretty much the way that should have gone.”

The big comedown

This is always one of the strangest weeks of the year. All this build-up -- the lights, the mistletoe, the endless rounds of rum-laced eggnog -- and then it ends, not with a grand symphonic crescendo but with a whimpering note from a lonely trumpet. Pauly Shore movies have had less disappointing climaxes.

Sometimes you have to wonder if the holidays justify all the preamble.

Not that I’m trying to be a Scrooge or anything. I like Christmas. This time of year it’s pretty much all I can write about, which either makes me lazy or a huge hypocrite, considering my Yule-crazed scribblings are a very part of the build-up I’m criticising. (Let’s be generous and say I’m a lazy hypocrite. Schoolchildren have called me worse names, and more recently than I’d care to admit.)

To get an idea of what I’m talking about, consider the day after Christmas. It tends to be one of the more depressing days of the year. There are no gifts left to give. No cards left to write. The turkeys and yams have all disappeared into our gastrointestinal systems. And if the tree is still up, it suddenly seems like an intruder, an oddity completely out-of-place next to our treadmills and Big Lots couches. Having a tree in your living room after the holidays are over is like smelling an apple pie when you’re already full: Unwanted and inexplicably aggravating.

It shouldn’t be that way, and doesn’t have to be. Nobody gets that feeling after a successful party, for instance. Let’s say Janet Binklebottom plans a birthday party for her best friend, Cathy Crustybritches. It promises to be a pretty extravagant affair, with a clown making balloon animals and a live band ripping through Styx covers while stage smoke blows from the nostrils of a plastic dragon. Fun stuff. Binklebottom sends a notice out to their friends three weeks in advance of the big blowout.

Now Cathy Crustybritches has a choice. She can mark the big event on her calendar and then proceed with her normal day-to-day life, working as a partner at her law firm, Crustybritches, Poopydiapers and Smith. Or she can turn the lead-up to the party into a marathon of colored lights, shopping sprees, gingerbread cookies and special Crustybritches birthday carols.

Option one: She goes to the party, has a great time, and feels awesome the next day. Totally worth the hangover, and wow, did you see that dragon smoke machine?

Option two: She goes to the party, has an okay time, but the next day she’s down in the dumps because there’ll be no more cookies and carols. The fun season is over. Despondent, she quits her job at the law firm and spends the rest of her days making stone tools in a cave in Bangladesh.

OK, so Carol’s a bit melodramatic. I can still understand the feeling.

The old saying goes, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” and there’s some truth to that. December’s typically a fun month because of all the fatty food and general shenanigans, to say nothing of the animatronic snowmen and lawn-gobbling reindeer tableaus. It just ends too suddenly -- a speeding train smashing into a brick wall, an adventure cut short. That day-after-Christmas feeling is a sort of mental whiplash. That’s why some people keep their trees up until February, when the skeletal evergreens are less fa-la-la-la-la and more fire hazard.

That’s why Christmas should last longer.

Not the Christmas season, mind you. That’s plenty long already, starting as it does roughly seven-and-a-half minutes after Independence Day ends. I’m talking about the holiday itself -- the family get-togethers, the movie marathons, the drunken renditions of “Santa Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” The way things are now, the giant build-up comes to a head on a single day, and there’s always this odd pressure to cram in as many festivities as possible to make the whole thing seem worth it. Presumably there are 12 days of Christmas, with seven lords a-leapin’ and six aunts a-belchin’, or however the song goes. So let’s act like it.

Dec. 25 can remain much the way it is. No need to mess with a good thing. After that, though, the whole infrastructure of holiday reverie should be dismantled gradually. On the 26th, the outdoor lights and manger scenes can come down -- Jesus, Mary and Joseph relegated once more to the basement, where they share space with riding lawn mowers and boxes filled with ceramic cats. On the 27th, the stockings come down. On the 28th, you kick Santa off the couch and drive him to the airport in your dented Dodge Dart, where he catches a plane back to the North Pole while quashing his gingerbread-filled stomach with a box of antacid tablets. And so on, until on the last day you finally take down your tree, ornaments and all, to be placed on the sidewalk, where crews bring it out to the transfer station and turn it into No. 2 pencils. This serves the dual purpose of cleansing your home while fulfilling your New Year’s resolution to recycle more. Yay, Earth!

Finally, when all is done, you can concentrate on settling in for a long winter of frozen eyelashes and doubled-up boxer briefs.

When divers surface from ocean depths too quickly, they get decompression sickness -- a.k.a., “the bends.” Next year, let’s avoid the Christmas bends by giving ourselves a gradual comedown. It’s the least we can do to honor the Crustybritches legacy.

Gifted givers

Some people are so easy to shop for they practically do the deed for you. One of my friends is obsessed with the heavy metal group Iron Maiden, and their merchandise is smattered with images of their mascot, Eddie, a zombie with an electrified Doc Brown hairdo and pale gray biceps the size of seal pups. His sneering face adorns clocks, car mats and action figures, which make for great gifts, assuming the giftee is a weirdo with a penchant for the macabre. That’s one item that was checked off my list before Labor Day.

Then there are those who are near impossible to find presents for this time of year. They’re the tricky ones, the ones who keep me on my toes, and I hate that. I’d much rather be off my toes. They get sore.

My father is a prime example of this. When I first started buying Christmas gifts for my folks, I figured he’d be the easy one; a former bar owner, he keeps a room in the house stocked with beer paraphernalia -- mirrors smeared with corporate logos and cardboard cutouts of improbably proportioned women wearing American flag bikinis. It’s a fantastic room. In a more just world it’d be a certified tourist attraction.

Mistakenly, I thought this would make things easy. A few clicks on eBay and I’d simply locate some obscure Budweiser memorabilia, a light-up sign featuring 3-D Clydesdales sipping suds from a keg or something, and boom. Done deal. Onto Uncle Hugh and his bizarre fixation on vintage Playboys.

Here’s the catch: You buy Dad a beer sign or a limited-edition frosted beer mug from scenic Holland, and into the room it goes, never again to be glimpsed by human eyes. Once in a while a new sign or mirror gets hung on the wall -- about every leap year, this happens -- but generally he keeps all his collectibles in a haphazard pile, perhaps anticipating how his belongings would be arranged after an epic flood or end-times earthquake. He calls this pile his retirement savings. He’s retired. And yet he still wears sweatpants until they’re as insubstantial as a layer of pollen. Curious.

With a guy like that, it’s a foolish endeavor to go with the obvious. So you’ve got to get creative.

This is where you turn gift-giving into an art form. It’s one thing to wave the white flag of surrender and buy something boring but practical, like tube socks or a nose hair trimmer. It’s another thing altogether to find that “Wow!” item, a gift that makes them weep like a whip-cracked baby.

The trick to solving this dilemma is to give it the brainpower you’d normally reserve for working out a complex physics equation. You can’t just wing it. Many holiday shoppers simply go to malls or local boutiques and browse the racks until something leaps out at them -- “Oh my gosh, Hubert will totally love this macramé candle holder made with the colors of the Bolivian flag!” This doesn’t always work, though, especially if you’re a selfish schmuck like me. I’ve attempted this method, and usually I just end up drawn to whatever items I’d want to see under my tree. Many a confused relative has walked away with Ninja Turtle beanie hats and video game controllers shaped like Flying V guitars. I don’t get a lot of phone calls.

To make my gifts a little more thoughtful, I started reserving time for brainstorming sessions. The typical one begins with me writing down everything I know about the person in question, even if it has no relevance to any gift I could possibly buy for them: social security number, criminal history, debit card access code, anything I can get my hands on. Then I review what I bought them the previous year so I don’t repeat myself. By the end of the session I’ve got their gift narrowed down to a few possibilities, with my final selection determined by how cheap it is.

At evening’s end, the reasoning goes something like this: OK, Bartleby is a 32 waist, but last year I bought him windpants with a picture of a mushroom cloud on the butt, so that’s irrelevant. He likes hip-hop, but I know less about hip-hop than I do about advanced software engineering, so let’s leave that one alone. He wears a lot of sweaters, but they’re all ugly, and it would be criminal of me to encourage this kind of behavior. Ah, I’ve got it! He’s a drunkard! I’ll just buy him a lot of liquor!

Indeed, when all other ideas fail, just buy people lots of liquor.

This is much the same thought process that people have anyway, just protracted and turned into an ordeal. It gets results, though. Rarely do I get a chance to catch my father off-guard and surprise him with something really nice, but a few years ago, that’s precisely what happened. In scouring the Internet, I tracked down a pair of women in Sabattus who make three-dimensional clay models of people based on photographs; email them a pic, and in a couple of weeks they mail you a small statue the size of an Academy Award. My father’s visage is ripe for this kind of interpretation, what with his shoulder-length hippie hair and a three-foot long triangle beard that could slice through chainmail. When he tore off the wrapping and saw his own sculpted mug staring back at him, he had to fight the tears from welling at the corners of his eyes. Pretty remarkable since he thinks crying is for sick toddlers and literally no one else.

All it took was a little creativity. These hard-to-shop-for family members can be vexing, but they’re also a fun challenge. Meet that challenge, and you’ll have a Christmas you won’t forget.

Now I need to start getting creative with my mother; I’ve already bought her every season of “The Golden Girls” on DVD. Time to start browsing for booze.

TV Guide my sleigh tonight

Maybe you’ve never heard of the old Rankin/Bass television production studio. Nobody could fault you for it. Not only is it not a household name, but it could never become one, seeing as how it sounds like someone’s description of a particularly smelly fish.

But if you’re within a certain age range -- say, between 20 and 80 -- then the good folks at Rankin/Bass have probably made your Christmases a little jinglier. And ring-ting-tinglier, too.

They’re the ones behind a glut of TV specials that have become annual staples, most of them made with stop-motion animation techniques. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.” The hand-drawn “Frosty the Snowman” (one of my personal favorites). All of these are Rankin/Bass productions, and all have become, to borrow a tired cliche, timeless classics. Airing year after year for decades, they’re as much a part of the fabric of the holiday as roasted chestnuts and discounted Old Navy pants.

These Rankin/Bass people were clearly geniuses. Not calculating-the-density-of-dark-matter geniuses, or inventing-the-Snuggie geniuses, but geniuses nonetheless.

Because what they recognized is this: Television can become tradition.

And tradition, of course, is what Christmas is all about. Consider all the rituals that are resurrected every December. The stockings filled with shaving cream and scratch tickets. Plastic manger scenes gobbling large tracts of lawns, with one toppled wise man eating a faceful of snow. Heavily-ornamented pine trees, eggnog with cinnamon, turkey and Santa and drunk relatives singing “Deck the Halls” in the key of just-shoot-me. These occur with such clockwork regularity you’d think society was suffering from a mass epidemic of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

When TV became ubiquitous in the 20th century, it was uniquely situated to become a part of these wintry shenanigans. It’s a communal activity, after all. Instead of gathering around the fire, families now gather in front of giant flatscreens, rooting for Charlie Brown and his flaccid little tree. It’s nice. It adds to the spirit of the season without requiring us to actually do anything.

In a house in Lewiston, tucked away in a basement next to old snowshoes and sixth-grade science projects, lies a weathered box marked “Christmas specials.” Inside it are moldy VHS tapes packed tight with Christmas cheer. My mother is to thank for this. During the early ’80s, she went through a phase in which she recorded pretty much anything on TV that was worth saving, and more than a few things that weren’t, including old soap operas and at least one production of the Ice Capades. She taped a bunch of Yuletide programming for posterity, perhaps sensing I’d rather spend my snow days watching tube instead of streaking down hills in a sled and picking ice from my nostrils. She was right.

Relatives would frown and fret over the time I spent in front of our weatherbeaten set. “You should be outside with friends, making memories,” bemoaned an aunt. “You can’t make memories in front of a TV.”

Wrong, auntie. I can and did. Older relatives saw my cousin and me watching movies and playing video games and scratched their heads, contrasting our chosen pastimes with their own childhood activities, which likely involved things like eating lead and repairing stagecoaches. It’s understandable that they wanted me to be more grounded in the real world, and I did on occasion chase down real-world pursuits, riding bikes and burning expletives onto wood beams with a magnifying glass. But there were times when the coziness and comfort of the living room beckoned. Winter and the warm tidings of December were prime for this, and I did make memories, without the inconvenience of feeling my toes gradually fall to the temperature of frozen cow carcasses.

A lot of those memories centered around my favorite holiday specials. Sure, I’ve got plenty of fond reminiscences of things that actually happened. Uncle Roger and his acoustic guitar, wailing on “Love Potion No. 9” in the paint-peeling squeals of a burning pig. That’s one. Tugging on a mall Santa’s beard and thinking he was the genuine article, despite the nicotine stains on his mustache. That’s another.

Those only happened once, though. “Rudolph” happens every year; that’s why many of us can quote lines from it by heart. “Didn’t I ever tell you about Bumbles? Bumbles bounce!” Thanks, Yukon Cornelius.

Maybe it’s corny, this infatuation with kids’ specials, but we’re allowed to be a little corny this time of year. That’s why I’m giving these TV specials another go-’round. I can’t watch VHS tapes anymore, since my last working VCR has gone the way of He-Man action figures and slap bracelets, relegated to a musty attic. Technology, however, gives a lot of this ancient programming new life. Many of my childhood favorites are now streaming on video sites, preserved digitally for my viewing enjoyment, and I don’t even have to fast-forward through commercials for Tootsie Pop and My Little Pony. One click, and I’m watching Jon Arbuckle’s grandmother relive past Christmases with housecat Garfield nestled in her lap. Frosty’s innocent exclamation of “Happy Birthday!” is just few keystrokes away, and somewhere, the California Raisins are riffing on funkified carols on an endless loop, from now to eternity.

It’s comforting that they’re all still there, sweetened and made more potent by time. Later in life, Christmas becomes an aggregate of all you’ve seen and experienced, lending it a richness and texture, if you’re lucky.

I used to do the bah-humbug thing. Now I do the Rankin/Bass thing. Call it an homage to their particular brand of genius, but if they can make the holidays a bit brighter, then bring on the reindeer games.

Video vertigo

Television news people are pretty clever. And no, I’m not referring to the yokel-type segments on Bigfoot sightings and dogs so ugly they’re cute.

 

It’s the men and women doing the graphics for those broadcasts who impress me, because they’ve somehow found a way to make viewer-submitted video somewhat watchable. Since the dimensions of these amateur clips rarely match the dimensions of a TV screen, the graphics people have started doing something subtle: filling up the unused part of the screen with either an inoffensive background graphic or a distorted, funhouse-mirror version of the video itself. This latter strategy hems in the actual clip with blurry, hallucinatory  images which provide light and movement without distracting from the central content. It’s great if you’ve been eating tabs of acid for about a month.

 

The preceding paragraph wouldn’t have made a lick of sense 10 years ago. (There’s a chance it still doesn’t; my meds are pretty killer.) These days, though, you can’t flip through the channels for more than five minutes without coming across one of these audience-generated clips, bookended on either side by a graphic artist’s fever dream. It’s a side effect of ubiquitous recording devices – the TV news has appropriated the public as unpaid content providers, and the public, in response, is submitting amateur work. Very amateur work. Work so amateur, much of it can be done by feral chickens with smartphones taped to their heads.

 

The reason these amateur videos don’t fit the TV screen properly is simple. People hold their phones the wrong way.

 

You don’t have to be watching TV to see this happen. Anyone with a Facebook account – meaning everyone except a handful of villagers in Zimbabwe – can see these videos eating up their computer and smartphone screens like flesh-eating bacteria. What happens is that Aunt Maude, sitting peacefully on a rocking chair on her back porch, spots a nearby squirrel juggling acorns in his front paws and banging his head in rhythm to the blast-beats of Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” Maude thinks, “Wait’ll my friends back in Tupelo get a load of this!” She whips out her phone to take video, but because she’s in a hurry, she holds it right-side up. Instead of being shot in a normal, sensible widescreen, the video looks like it was shot through a coffin-shaped keyhole, an off-looking vertical orientation that causes more headaches than the snare drum of a high school marching band.

 

This vertical format does nothing good for the framing. The squirrel is a small blip down at the bottom, barely discernible. Meanwhile, the upper two-thirds of the video consists mainly of power lines and a billboard advertising see-through thermal underwear.

 

Now granted, I’m not a smartphone user. Maybe I’m a Luddite, but I consider them to be an evil technology; though they offer convenience in the form of Internet access and instant photos of genitalia, they sap attention spans and addict their users to hyper-connectedness and “virtual” culture. Until the past couple of years, I resignedly accepted that. It annoyed me to constantly see peoples’ faces lit by the glow of their mobile devices, but as I was not one of them, I let it roll off my back.

 

I can’t do that anymore. Phones are now content-generating machines, and a lot of that content ends up on websites and TV shows. I was surfing through channels a couple of months ago and stumbled across “America’s Funniest Videos,” a show I didn’t know still existed. They were showing a themed clip package – kitten mishaps, adorable – and amidst of a crop of regular videos, there it was, a vertical job that effectively utilized about 15 percent of my available screen space. A cat was jumping off a kitchen counter and landing awkwardly in his water dish. Because of the video’s top-to-bottom aspect ratio, I got a lovely view of peach-colored ceiling tiles, and a spot of water damage just to the left of the refrigerator. Great framing, bub. Spielberg is weeping into an Indiana Jones hat.

 

Sometimes I wonder what will happen after humans go extinct – whether there’ll be any advanced species from our cosmic neighborhood combing through the detritus we’ve left behind. They may not be able to understand our texts, written in alien tongues. But our digital files, including our smartphone videos, are encoded in a binary format – that simple on/off language which should be easily readable by any star-surfing explorers. So let’s envision a hypothetical. Let’s say Poobuns, a humanoid creature from the planet Dyspepsia, touches down on Earth in the year 4872. One of the first things Poobuns encounters upon landing is an ancient smartphone, buried under the rubble of the Early 21st Century Heritage Museum in Hackensack, New Jersey. After puzzling over it for some time, Poobuns figures out how to connect the old phone to a power source and, amazingly, it still works. Since it operates via touchscreen, and Poobuns has 12 fingers on each hand, it’s only a short while before he’s swiping through photos of smiling children and curly fry baskets from Applebee’s.

 

Then he comes across a video. He’s disoriented at first because, like a human Earthling, he’s got two eyes horizontally arranged on his face; his eyesight, therefore, is panoramic in nature, and his instinct is to view the video left-to-right, lengthwise. Poobuns then figures out his mistake and turns the phone on its side.

 

“Why,” he wonders, “would you frame a video in such a manner if your eyesight is naturally panoramic? Judging from this species’ movie projectors and TV screens, that’s how everything else is shot. All you’d have to do is rotate this device a mere 90 degrees. Silly creatures. No wonder they’re extinct.”

 

Bemused, Poobuns tosses the device over one shoulder, where it lands atop a pile of debris, still playing this digital home movie. The rocket boosters on Poobuns’ alien ship drowns out the noise of a raucous Slayer tune issuing from the smartphone’s tinny speakers, and on the screen, a squirrel juggles nuts – banging his little head in the smoldering wasteland of eternity.