Winding things up after the gift giving

Christmas presents. I'm not an ungrateful man, but I have Christmas presents from two or three years ago that I have never touched.

Right now I am staring at an Emergency Wind-up Radio Flashlight from 2008.

OK, I am an ungrateful man.

So now, at the very fag end of 2009, I open it.

This present is more than what it seems.

It also has an alarm, not for making early morning flights, but for when someone is running towards you with crooked teeth and a machete.

It makes an awful racket.

But this flashlight thing will also charge a mobile phone without batteries, AC power or solar panels! It uses a wind-up lever.

You pump this thing with bulging forearm veins for one minute, and you are in business.

I don't know where Meridian Energy were when this hit the market, but one of these small wind-up levers behind every taggle of tussock on the Maniototo would power Hamilton and Lower Hutt for a full calendar year.

This is where Christmas presents are underrated.

Some of the most bizarre things you have ever laid eyes on can turn out to be treasures.

This year I gave my brother a $5 fly-killer gun from Harvey Norman.

The label said "It really works!" My brother hunts deer and wild boar with musket and pick-axe, so the gun concept was germane, if a little on the budget side.

He unwrapped it at the family present-giving ceremony and fired the whazmo across the room.

It was still gaining speed when it hit the far wall, and it hit that wall with a sound you wouldn't easily forget.

Clearly this $5 thing could take out a possum.

And I'll warrant my brother is doing this as we speak.

Another Christmas has passed and I am now picking through the bag of presents from two weeks ago.

To be fair, males become hard to buy presents for by the age of 12.

Is it any wonder they sulk right through their teenage years, having been torn without warning from bicycles and games consoles and handed instead, T-shirts from museum gift shops and deodorant sticks?

Men are worse.

Old feeble atrophying men with bitter cynical minds, like me, are just impossible.

People trying to buy presents for us finish up with a gaggle of possibilities on Christmas Eve, wondering which ones to give us, and which to give to the tombola stall at the next school fair.

Admittedly, we are allowed to choose our own presents, and this time I chose a fabulous pair of computer speakers.

But then there's the other stuff.

The first present I am plucking from the bag is a backgammon set.

I got the back story for this during a period of routine phone surveillance in late November.

Would Roy like a backgammon set, came the plaintive inquiry to my wife.

I got it in a garage sale.

I think it's brand new.

I make no apologies for phone surveillance.

It is vital I know what I am getting on Christmas Day so I can correctly identify every shape before unwrapping, almost as if I am terribly smart.

All bitter and cynical old men do this.

I believe in the World Of Present Opening, or Wopo.

The term for us is bastard.

But the big one two weeks ago was a gargantuan outdoor umbrella.

This is one way people solve the problem of finding presents for ageing men, they merely give it to the family, reasoning that the ageing man can share, or, because he is ageing, not even notice.

Any day now we will be setting up for a picnic in the back garden.

And if anyone gets angry when I say I threw the umbrella, my present, off the Outram bridge because I needed the space for golf clubs, then I'll just push the alarm button on the Emergency Wind-up Radio Flashlight.

- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.