On Christmas morning, I tried to keep everything as normal as possible.<\/p>\n
We get up, open presents and enjoy our annual treat of mini powdered donuts. But, at some point, I may have wanted to sneak off to each room in the house to see if I missed a special present.<\/p>\n
My wife would never keep a present from me. But, as she knows all too well, I carry many scars from my younger days. One Christmas, my family tried to hide an awesome present from me.<\/p>\n
They actually didn\u2019t try and hide it. I just like to make things more dramatic than they seem sometimes. But I did go a large portion of Christmas Day one year without knowing that Santa had brought all of us a new air hockey table. I\u2019m sure someone told me that Santa had a pretty nice surprise, but I prefer to think they hid the thing from me.<\/p>\n
I must have been 10 or so because I remember that most, if not all, my siblings were there that morning. The lower floor of our house was clearly split into the part with carpet and the part with a tile floor. That year, my pile of presents sat pretty far away from the door to the tile part of our basement.<\/p>\n
Unknown to me, my brothers spent a good part of that Christmas morning in the tiled area playing air hockey. Well, I\u2019m sure they did. I don\u2019t really know because I never really heard the game from where I sat.<\/p>\n
I had plenty of other things to occupy me that day, but those seemed completely inconsequential once I found out we had an air hockey table in the back room. At some point, I looked up and asked where everyone was. Someone told me they were all playing air hockey. This totally changed the day.<\/p>\n
True to form, however, I remember a lot more about sitting in the family room wondering where everyone was than I do about playing air hockey later in the day. Sometimes, I hate that I focus on that part of the experience.<\/p>\n
Even though I try and turn the air hockey table story into some tale of woe, I know that it represented a big part of why I love Christmas. That marked the first of many days we spent playing the game. I have had pretty good fortune in my life so if missing out on a few hours of air hockey represents a tragedy \u2013 a wholly manufactured tragedy \u2013 than I can\u2019t really complain.<\/p>\n
I have no expectations of an air hockey table turning up at our house or anywhere else I go this holiday season, but I still have this compulsion to go check other parts of the party to see if one present escaped my view.\u00a0 I learned my lesson on that pretty awesome Christmas when we all got a new game to play.<\/p>\n
After all, it beats the time I got sick all over my presents one Christmas morning. I believe Matchbox City took the brunt of it. Or maybe it was Matchbox Country.<\/p>\n
Either way, that\u2019s a Christmas memory I don\u2019t think I can turn into a positive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Christmas morning, I tried to keep everything as normal as possible. We get up, open presents and enjoy our annual treat of mini powdered donuts. But, at some point, I may have wanted to sneak off to each room…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-family","category-holidays","wpcat-3-id","wpcat-16-id","wpcat-61-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2018"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2021,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}