Christmas Day was two days ago. I wrote this before Christmas Day. But because I am a man and technically slightly old, I knew days before Christmas what I was getting, so I can discuss that now, without fear of telling a single fib.
Men are very hard to buy for after the age of 14. Apparently. For a while we get socks and deodorants. Then by the time we hit 30, we throw out huge clues so we don't get this tombola stand crap . But these clues are rarely understood. In recent years, I have been buying all my own presents and wrapping them up with messages of love, devotion, awe and respect from every member of the internal and extended family. The presents have been uniformly well-chosen and I have responded upon their opening with surprisingly believable astonishment.
After rubbishing Kindles all year, saying nothing could ever replace a real book, I lashed out in November and bought one. It was either that or make by body useless from the elbow down for what remains of my life. I have been reading incessantly in hardback form, huge tumbling tomes that go on for hundreds and hundreds of pages. As I have to eat and drink while I read, this means books that weigh nearly as much as Gerry Brownlee have had to be supported by one tiny left hand while I gobble and slosh with the right.
Changing hands merely doubles the problem. After I finished Kitty Kelley's The Royals, and by hokey, what a magnificent slag-heap of sleaze and witless foppery THAT was, I lost all the strength from both wrists and my fingers were bent, gnarled and sore. Doctors at the hospital assumed Dupuytren's disease. Amputation was muttered behind cupped hands.
So I bought a Kindle, which can hold The Royals and another 1199 books as well, weighing in no heavier than half a packet of honey puffs. What a fantastic thing! Such is my respect for my wife, I chose her to give it to me. And being a reasonable and reciprocal man, I told her she had $109 to spend on all the clothes she could muster. It is important we are equal on Christmas Day.
And on Christmas Day, when I would have excitedly, almost hungrily, ripped the coloured paper off the Kindle, even though I used it all December, and put my hand to my mouth exclaiming - "I don't beLIEVE this!" - and lassoed my wife with love-swarming arms, every human in the room would have wept alligator tears at the beauty that is giving.
I also got/would have got a pavlova, because I always get a pavlova, and goddammit, I love pavlovas. This one probably came without cream, because it's hard to keep cream fresh under cellophane for 10 days, but it's the meringue that counts. I am sure I got Peter Busskind's Star : The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty, and Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll, edited by Jim Driver, because I bought them in Melbourne the week before. Five dollars each! These will have been given to me by people who said they would pay up to $30 for a present for Roy. Just call it 20 for each one, it's Christmas, I would have told them.
Finally, there would have been lollies, because I am diabetic. Again Melbourne cut the mustard with a beautifully-named store in the Greek sector, The Jerky Shop. Unending bins of unwrapped lollies, a recidivist dribbling stoner's delight.
There were certainly plenty of recidivist dribbling stoners there when we popped in late one night to see Munchies Syndrome in all its goggle-eyed pant. The strength of this shop is they hybrid lollies you already know into strange, new, fantastic better things, like combining the candy banana, not always respected, with the historically-adored jube.
A candy banana outside with a jube inner! Bwahahahah! Eyeball-humming ecstasis. On Christmas Day, I bet I surveyed these and shouted - "It's a MIRACLE!!" Even when you're technically slightly old, Christmas can be fun.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
