Christmas Review

Best Gift That Wasn't On My List: A 4-CD compilation of punk music entitled "No Thanks." It's a virtually exhaustive history of the music I loved as a teen and very few others have heard of any of the bands on it. It's good to have music that your children raise their eyebrows at.

Gift I'll Use The Most: The "Late Night with David Letterman" coffee mug that is just like the one his guests drink out of.

Most Unique Gift: I got a deal that has a combination of flashlight, emergency siren, thermometer, AM/FM radio, compass, and 5-inch black and white television built right in. It's also blue and has the Auburn University Tigers' logo on it...I can't imagine what kind of fix I'd have to be in to need all that stuff at once!

Gift That Requires An Open Mind: My sister-in-law loaded down one of my daughters with a couple of country music CD's. While I think this borders on abuse, the pendulum swings both ways when you're trying to expose your kids to whole spectrum of the arts.

Best Stocking Stuffer: How can you go wrong with a fancy-schmancy executive travel kit? It's got razors and toothbrushes and combs and clippers that all come apart James Bond style and plug into this very small silver James Bond type briefcase.

First DVD Shown: In the year of the DVD, we had about 10 choices ranging from "A Knight's Tale" to "Dumb and Dumber." We chose "Seabiscuit" on the premise none of us had seen it. Since we knew that the people we were buying DVD's for had newly acquired surround sound, we made a couple of purchases based on cool Dolby features (FYI: Jurassic Park and Twister rated high on sound, as did Pirates of the Caribbean).

Best Kid Gift The Grown-Ups Pirated: A table-top basketball game with plexiglass backboard that uses ping-pong balls you try to bounce in the hoops. Thus far, I'm unbeaten.

Best Inspirational Gift: A tie. Kelsey got a "Auburn Athletics" t-shirt that has "softball" in the rectangucircle sandwiched between the large letters. She also got an incredible art-supply set and some lessons to see what else we can get out of her budding art brain.

Best Overall Result: Only three exchanges need to be made out of the smorgasborg of gifts and two of those are CD's.

So, today will be spent in recovery mode...that melancholy feeling of "it's over" and there's a certain amount of stress relief. It should make for great napping.