By Tim Sanders

Children love Christmas. Oh okay, so Tibetan children and Sudanese children and Stephen King’s Children of the Corn may not love Christmas, but let’s not quibble, here. At my advanced age, I don’t have the energy to worry about political correctness. Actually, I never did worry about it much.

The point is that after we’ve left the playgrounds of childhood, worked our way across the football fields of adulthood, and finally found ourselves tottering through that dark tunnel toward the locker room of elderliness, a lot of the fun of the Christmas season is gone. Like, for example, the fun of trying to discover where our loved ones have hidden our presents, so that we can sneak them out of their hiding places and play with them before Christmas Day. By which I mean our presents, not our loved ones.

When I was eleven, I was a very urbane, sophisticated child. I had lost interest in sequined Roy Rogers cowboy outfits and engraved Gene Autry cap pistols. No, I was above all of that childish nonsense. I wanted what any mature, thoughtful adult male would want–a genuine Josh Randall "Wanted Dead or Alive" Mare’s Leg carbine with realistic hard plastic holster, just like the one Steve McQueen wore on TV. It came with authentic looking bullets and fired realistic sounding caps; the very latest in toy technology.

So I dropped a lot of subtle hints about the log chains Jacob Marley’s ghost had to wear because he never considered buying a McQueen Mare’s Leg for any of London’s poor street urchins, and by mid-December I was fairly confident that my parents had taken the bait and purchased the Josh Randall carbine. All I had to do was find it. That was easy. The Mare’s Leg was only about a foot long, and Mom always hid small presents in the same location–the drawer in her dining room buffet where she kept her yarn and sewing paraphernalia. She thought she was clever, but she didn’t realize who she was dealing with. She was dealing with Josh Sanders, Bounty Hunter.

So one day while my parents were gone I found that carbine, held it, stroked it, strapped it to my leg, admired myself striding back and forth in front of the mirror humming the "Wanted Dead or Alive" theme, shot off a few rounds of caps, and completed several other quality control procedures just to ensure that it was not defective. Then I re-wrapped it and put it right back where I got it. I expressed an appropriate amount of surprise when I unwrapped it again on Christmas morning, and my parents expressed an equally appropriate amount of surprise at the copious amount of Scotch tape I’d used when I re-wrapped it.

And I was not all that unique. My wife was involved in the very same kind of subterfuge when she was a youngster. But now that we’re adults, we don’t feel the need to sneak around looking for hidden Christmas gifts, do we?

Well, no, we certainly don’t have to sneak around. Not when we do our Christmas shopping on eBay, we don’t. Just in case you’ve spent the last decade in a tree in Borneo studying orangutans (which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with Borneo, or trees, or orangutans), eBay is the online auction site which offers literally zillions of items on which consumers with computers are invited to bid. After you’ve completed your transaction, the good people at eBay always congratulate you and tell you that YOU’VE WON! (And as long as you consider "winning" paying more than any of the other millions of goobers who’ve looked at that very same item were willing to pay for it, I suppose you have.) So after you’ve outfoxed all of those other bidders, using your sharp wit, your keen keyboard fingers and your trained mouse, and after that Christmas present arrives, do you wrap it immediately, like any patient, self-respecting adult would do? Well of course not. First, just like you felt obliged to do when you were a kid, you have to try it out to make sure it works. It’s your duty.

A couple of weeks ago my wife’s Christmas present, a little, round robotic device called a Scooba, which mops and dries linoleum and hardwood floors while the proud owner is supervising, pretending to be a person of leisure, arrived on our doorstep in a box large enough to hold an actual charwoman and a regulation-sized mop. Marilyn knew she was getting it, in fact she was the one who’d bid on it, but she wasn’t ready to wrap it yet. First she had to play with it. She charged the battery, loaded the device with cleaning solution, and turned it loose on the kitchen floor. We both had a great deal of fun watching it bump into walls and cupboards, groan, skitter along for a bit, and then careen off in a completely new direction. Our dachshund, Maggie, was not impressed. She barked through the entire demonstration. When the Scooba got itself caught under a chair, growled and shuddered until it extricated itself, and then scooted across the floor toward Maggie, she scrambled away, convinced it was carnivorous. I think the fact that it had left a wet trail behind it only added to her consternation. It had obviously been marking its territory.

Marilyn’s eBay present to me is one of those automotive global positioning devices. It is superior to her Scooba, because you can plug it into your car’s cigarette lighter and it will tell you exactly when and where to turn and get you where you want to go using advanced satellite signals. It talks, for Pete’s sake! And it doesn’t get the floor all wet, or frighten the dog, or allow you to run into walls. When it arrived, we immediately took it out on a test run and found that, surprise, we were able to find our way to the very end of our street, and then directly back home again. WONDERFUL! I had a great deal of fun playing with it–by which I mean assuring myself that the device was in good working order–before Marilyn wrapped it.

So, come Christmas morning, Marilyn and I will both have our new technological toys, and we’ll both act appropriately surprised. I only hope she doesn’t notice the extra tape on my re-wrapped package.

Some things never change.