By Tim Sanders

The Thanksgiving holiday is over. Families have gathered, stuffed themselves with turkey and dressing, exchanged memories of Thanksgivings past, and we can only hope there were few serious injuries this year. You know how families are.

Everybody in our family chose one particular thing to be thankful for last Thursday. I had recently read Popular Science’s annual list of the 10 Worst Jobs in Science, and I was especially thankful that I was not one of those Harvard researchers in Borneo whose job it was to wait under trees and catch orangutan urine in plastic sheets so as to test it for reproductive hormone levels. My wife and son were both thankful that I'd decided not to renew my subscription to Popular Science.

At any rate, now we can lean back, relax, take a sip of coffee, and then throw on our jackets and rush to the malls to continue the maniacal Christmas shopping sprees we started last Friday morning at 5–the sprees which will continue unabated until Christmas Eve. Then on Christmas morning we’ll rip open our presents, contemplate the true meaning of Christmas for a split second, stuff ourselves with turkey again, drop off into another tryptophan-induced sleep in the afternoon, and the day after Christmas we’ll race out to visit even more shopping centers to return some of those gifts we didn’t really want in the first place; things like that Ronce Combination Clamp Base Apple Peeler and Nose Hair Trimmer, the soulful "Them Biscuits is Nasty" CD by Porter Wagoner and the Pips, and that lovely oil on velvet painting of the three wise men, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Elvis in sequined robe, cape, and sandals, presenting a gilded Les Paul guitar to the baby Jesus.

I don’t remember the holiday season being so frenetic when I was a kid. In our house, we had our Thanksgiving meal at noon and in the afternoon my Dad and I either sat in front of the TV, waiting for the Thanksgiving Day Lions/Packers game, or we got our rifles and headed for the woods, where we sat against a couple of trees, waiting for a whitetail deer to appear. Our main purpose, of course, was to show our gratitude for Mom’s Thanksgiving meal by getting out of her way so she could clean the kitchen.

We never put up our Christmas tree until a week or two before Christmas. That was because in those ancient times people did not, as a rule, start decorating for the holiday in September like they do today. Folks had this naive notion back then that three months of Christmas was two-and-a-half months too many. Another reason we waited to put up the tree was that Dad never cut down a tree, he always dug up a small spruce, roots and all, which he then set in a galvanized tub full of dirt in our living room. As you might imagine, this made Mom deliriously happy. After Christmas he transplanted that tree to our lakefront property in Northern Michigan--assuming that it survived until the frozen tundra up there thawed.

When I was very young, we often made Christmas trips to my Grandfather’s house in Indiana. Grandpa Gephart, my mom’s dad, was my last living grandparent. And although he was in his eighties, and lived there in the old Victorian home with my Uncle Bob and his family in those days, it was still "Grandpa’s house." The holidays I enjoyed most were all spent in that Otterbein, Indiana farmhouse. The old home place had a windmill outside, between the house and the barn. My uncle Bob raised corn and soybeans, mostly, along with hogs. I did not spend much time with the hogs, since they never seemed to care for me much. No, I spent most of my time pestering my aunts, uncles, and cousins, many of whom–unlike the hogs–liked being around me, because they lived in Indiana, not in Michigan, and didn’t know me all that well.

In those days visiting Mom’s family at Christmas was much more important to me than the Christmas presents themselves. That may be because Indiana farm people are such good-natured folks, and it may be because in those days, when it came to Christmas presents, underwear and socks always rated high on my parents’ list of what I needed. They’d survived the Great Depression, and put a lot of stock in underwear and socks. They'd never forgotten the severe underwear shortage of 1933. One year I do remember getting a fine lever-action cork gun and a dozen or so plastic spacemen. I spent a lot of time on Grandpa’s living room rug, setting those spacemen up and shooting ‘em down. It was kind of a Gene Autry meets Flash Gordon thing. and Flash and his men were seriously outgunned.

But how did you survive without electronic entertainment, you ask? Well, I had electronics, too--or electrics, anyway. Otterbein, Indiana is a tiny farming community a few miles northwest of Lafayette, and in the mid-1950s many residents still had crank telephones. Talk about your electronic entertainment, I loved nothing more than visiting my Aunt Gladys in town, cranking her wood-framed magneto wall phone and telling the operator, whom everybody called "Central," that I wanted to talk to Charley Gephart. Miss Central, whoever she was, actually knew my grandfather and my Uncle Bob, and would ring their phone in a nanosecond and tell them Charley's grandson was on the line. You don’t get that kind of service from your cell phone provider nowadays. And if that weren’t enough electronic entertainment, then you should know that the same year I got the cork gun and the spacemen was the year I tested the awesome power of alternating current by sticking a hairpin into an electric outlet at Grandpa’s house. It’s not that I was an especially stupid child ... I was simply conducting a sophisticated scientific experiment. That’s what my mom told the relatives when the sparks flew and the lights went out, anyway. And my Indiana relatives appreciated my scientific curiosity, too. They were always saying encouraging things like, "Come here, Marie. It’s twenty-two degrees outside, and I do believe your little Clarence Birdseye has his tongue stuck to that iron pump handle," "Oh look, young Isaac Newton’s headed for the horse trough with old Tabby, again, and Tabby ain't happy! This should be good!" or "Hey Bob, how about we give little Edison another hairpin?"

I could go on, but if you’ve read this far, you’ve already wasted valuable time. There are less than thirty shopping days left until Christmas. You should be out there, now, fighting with several other lunatics over that very special sophisticated electronic Apple iPod you want for Grandpa. The newscasters are all predicting a severe iPod shortage this season. (If you find one for Gramps, be sure and explain to him exactly how it works. If he’s anything like me, he’ll probably go nuts looking for the crank.)