Christmas Lists

My family has a practice where everyone submits suggestions for gifts they would like to receive for Christmas. You aren’t guaranteed to get everything on it, but you know you’ll get at least a few things and it saves everyone the trouble of trying to figure out what to get for each other.

When I was young, I loved making my Christmas List. There were so many toys, games, and other things I wanted. In fact, the hard part of making the list was selecting what exactly to put on the list since drafting a full page of stuff would be seen as being greedy.

These days, creating a Christmas List is really hard. This is partly because my desire (and available storage space) for possessions has dramatically shrunk since I was a kid, and partly because some of the few things I want these days are expensive and I’m not going to ask my family to pay for anything like that. One of the other things that makes creating Christmas Lists hard for me is that my gaming hobby, which should be a veritable fountain of Christmas List suggestions, is off-limits. I don’t know why, but I can’t bring myself to ask my family to get me video games for Christmas. Years ago I put a game on my list and got it on Christmas, but I felt so guilty about it that I resolved never to do it again. Am I secretly ashamed of my passion for playing and writing about video games? If so, maybe I should put a game on this year’s list to try to put a dent in that mental wall.

At the time of my writing this post I’m in the middle of agonizing over this year’s Christmas List. I should have tried to make one prior to Black Friday so my family could take advantage of any sales on stuff I wanted but it’s been really hard to think up stuff for it. Hopefully by the time you’re reading this I’ve been able to come up with something suitable to send out to my family.