THE LISTS HAVE been circulated. The plans have been drawn up. Early scouting forces have already begun to hit the malls and probe the Internet.
It’s official. The Rochat family’s annual Christmas Invasion is under way.
OK, so maybe our gift-planning strategies don’t quite approach the complexity of D-Day. But I’ve gotta believe they come close. With one sister in Washington, me in Kansas, and everyone else in Colorado, a certain amount of central coordination is essential.
Most times, the planning works out pretty well. Lists are circulated early on to the High Command (my folks) with a few “friendly reminders” given to last-minute stragglers like myself. There’s the usual back-and-forth to see who wants to get what for whom (much simplified by Amazon) along with suggestions for the truly impossible-to-shop-for. And come the big day, there are a lot of smiles and stories and more-than-welcome gifts.
Of course, no battle plan ever completely survives contact with reality. Not that we’ve had any bad gifts, mind you. But in a few recent Christmases, there have been some gifts that were so nice we got them twice.
Like the pair of New York Times almanacs we got one year.
Or the year that I got Heather “The Muppet Movie” only to find that she’d given it to me, too.
The dueling copies of “Chicken Run” were fun to have.
And of course, there was the year of the Beatles. Heather’s list that year had given a prominent place to “The Beatles Anthology,” a gigantic silver tome that could probably be considered a hazard to low-flying aircraft. My parents answered the call and, come Christmas morning, my wife was excitedly unwrapping her copy of a Beatlemaniac’s dream.
Then came Christmas dinner with her family, a high-energy affair where every member of the Hargett family past, present and future converges on her grandparents’ home. In the midst of the merry chaos, Heather received a present from her dad. It was big. It was thick. It was eerily familiar.
It was “The Beatles Anthology” again.
We laughed. We said thank you. We told what had happened, to some chuckling and shaking of heads. And we thought, “Oh, well, it’s another Christmas memory.”
Little did we realize. A few days later, on our way home, we stopped over with Heather’s other grandmother, in Ft. Morgan. Heather’s mom had sent her Christmas presents there from California ... including a solid, heavy shape we had come to know quite well.
“She didn’t.”
She did. We now had one copy of “The Beatles Anthology” for each (then) surviving Beatle. Thank goodness John didn’t have to be represented too, or we might have needed a trailer hitch for the drive home.
We came to know the return policy of Amazon.com quite well that year.
The funny thing is, we were never irritated for a second.. How could we be? It was like we had been cast as the central victims in a Marx Brothers movie that just kept getting funnier and funnier. Everyone had meant well and got to share in our amusement as the joke refused to die.
Those kind of memories, the ones of laughter and family fun, are a far better Christmas gift than anything I’ve ever gotten under the tree.
Well, well. If that don’t beat all.
Or should that be ‘Beat-le’?