and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Every year after the leaves have fallen to the ground and the weather turns towards the truly chilly side people start asking me what I want for Christmas. The funny thing is that I never have an answer.

They usually goad me into saying something, or else they make suggestions as if they were inside my head sifting through my own thoughts.. except they are in their own head and their thoughts never match up with mine so it's a busted operation anyway. So I made a decision to never get forced into an answer - or if I was - I would give the most unreasonable answers.

A Porsche 911.

A Ducati 916.

A Mule.

That usually shuts people up right good but I'm hoping one of these days someone will actually up and get me one of these things. Clearly, I don't need them, but heck.. why not? It's a quality of life issue and is there any reason that, given my lot in life as a citizen of the United States of America and a financially sound one at that, I shouldn't have at least one of these things? Would not a person of lesser fortunes snarl viciously at me for not taking advantage of my position?

Really, not owning a porsche is sort of like starving on a desert island and not eating the coconuts. Sort of.

The problem with the mule answer, however, is that it's not such a far off option so I have to be careful who I mutter that one to. A mule can go a long way in these hard times. They're like the tauntauns of Earth - smelly pack animals that you can slice open and live in during the winter months if things get real bad. So who wouldn't consider a mule a great gift? You all laugh but with the way the world is going, terrorists and nuclear bombs that will blow us all sky high, we might be living in a ice-world-of-the-hoth-system type of situation soon enough.

But isn't the point of Christmas ( minus all that religious mumbo-jumbo, cause I ain't buying that ) to give gifts that are thoughtful and well considered and pertinent and important and and and? When did this change? When did it become okay to buy gift certificates and call it a day? When did it become okay to start spending willy-nilly with no personal thought placed on a single purchase decision?

In the generation I grew up in it was pretty common to get money in a card from your great uncle or your grandmother. This was, of course, back when gift certificates and gift cards and the like were less prevelant and money was still a physical medium exchanged between individuals as barter for goods and services. It was a good system because it freed up a lot of resources that were previously going towards the process of bartering. Before, a man had to take his chickens down to the market and trade them for a gun, so he could take the gun down to the farmer and trade it for some carrots, so he could then take those carrots home to his wife and trade them for some sex. Even back then life was tough after marriage. Anyhow, money was once considered a good idea and we got it in christmas cards sent to us by our extended relatives. It was nice because our extended relatives realized that they were not the right people to be buying us very personalized gifts since they didn't see us day to day and therefore couldn't really say what we liked and didn't like. So the money was a perfect solution.

Maybe that was the first step... or maybe it only opened the door but now we have fathers, mothers, daughters, brothers.. all giving each other gift certifcates and calling it good. I know a guy who got Mcdonald dollars from his significant other. We have entire families that are too lazy to stop and think or even get to know their own people. Families too engrossed in the television to look up and see the people around them and understand their lives. We have a breaking down of the American Family Unit. Maybe the gift certificate is one of the many results of this... or maybe.. just maybe.. the gift certificate is the very root - the cause - of the breakdown of the social fabric of of the american way of life. The fabric is threadbare and thin and has holes so big you could slide entire L.L. Bean catalogs through it and maybe, just maybe, it's all the gift certificate's fault. Maybe.

I sat down with a friend's father a few years ago. It was right around the holiday season and he asked what I had gotten my sister for Christmas. I hemmed and hawed and told him my ideas but that I hadn't made the final purchase yet. "Maybe a gift certificate," I said. He began a long rant about the injustices of the gold watch for a retirement gift and how it just showed how you can work with people for 30, 40, even 50 years and in the end they know you no better than the day you started. Know you no better than your wrist size and that you are an American male and probably need a watch. He told me that gift certificates were the bane of Christmas and how they were the most impersonal and unjust gifts a man could give. He told me there was more thought in the act of placing coal in someone's stocking than there was in purchasing a gift certifcate. "Do you know you don't even have to write their name anymore? They get it to print out right on the card," he said. He sighed. So I asked him what he had decided on for his daughter.

"I got her a gift certificate," he said.