my typical christmas, as a kid...

I was a little shit. Seriously. And not just at Christmastime.*

But come each December, as gifts from various friends and family started to pile up under the tree, I would lie in wait for my parents to leave the house. Fortunately for my brother and me, they sang in the church choir. And once we were old enough to stay home alone, we ended up having many opportunities to do so, since they had to go to all sorts of rehearsals and special masses.

And the reason why this alone-at-home time was so important: I had come up with a master plan to find out what *all* my presents were long before the 25th. All it took was a pair of scissors and some tape.

With the scissors, I would slit open each seam where the tape met the wrapping paper, unwrap the present, decide whether I liked it or not (the latter situation being good to know about in advance, so I could adequately prepare myself for pretending to like it later), and then either remove and replace the old tape, or simply re-tape where it had been slit open. No one was the wiser. And my brother enjoyed the advance notice as well.

The only time we had any issue doing this was the year we got an ATARI 2600. We were *dying* to play with it, and it was *soooo* tempting to take it out of the box and fire it up. But we had principles, man. Yeah... right!



*Throughout the year, I beat my little brother to a pulp, taunted him (he had a horrendous temper, and I could ignite it at the drop of a hat), and generally got him in trouble with our parents. I was almost always the instigator, but I had a way of looking angelic, making all adults think that the enraged one, next to me, was the one causing the problem. God, considering the number of times I royally screwed him over, I'm shocked that we're actually on speaking terms these days!