journal features

X'mas for Mari

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2009.12.22

It occurred to me today that while my wife loves chocolate, she wouldn't have time at X'mas to eat any.

We're flying to Miyazaki on Saturday morning, so she'd not have time to do justice to a special X'mas box of chocolate. So I decided to surprise her a few days early.

On the way home with my prize, it then occurred to me that I could make a pre-X'mas gift a bit more fun by making an adventure out of it. I gathered up a bunch of old business cards (I've acquired a few "prior employers" over the years) and stapled one to the inside of the X'mas greeting card I'd picked up along with the chocolates. The greeting card went onto our humble collection of cards that we've received this year, and a second card went onto the fridge to point out the "new card that came today".

When Mari spotted the "new card", she found inside it the stapled business card, which told her to look in a certain place in the apartment "for her X'mas treat". The indicated place of course contained a second card, which pointed to a third location. And so on.

I incorporated into this sequence the family of stuffed animals that live with us. One card would say, "Snoopy moved your gift to..." while the next would say, "Blah Blah and Panda" moved it to..." On those occasions, Mari would find the named stuffed animal(s) along with the next business card. By the time she had about eight cards, I think she was beginning to fear that there was no treat. But finally, in the closet, she found the final card which told her that the frogs had stolen her gift but thatthey hadn't made it out of the closet. She frantically searched the place and found her Godiva chocolates with the twinned plush frogs (which chirp "I love you" when you pull them apart on their string).

When it was all over, she said, "Thank you for the adventure!"

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)