My 2007 Christmas List, or Things I Forgot to Ask for This Year

I had dif­fi­culty this year sat­is­fy­ing sev­eral fam­ily mem­bers’ requests for a list of what I want for Christ­mas. I hon­estly think part of that is because I’m no longer a kid, but I haven’t quite real­ized that com­pletely. What I mean is that when I try to think of things I’d like to have, I think in terms of that which enter­tains. Toys to a child, video games to a teen, movies and music to every­one else. Most movies I would pre­fer never to see, most music either insults my intel­li­gence or my faith, most video games I get bored with rather quickly, and I’ve no use for toys.

But when the time comes to think of what I want, I still instinc­tively try to think of video games, movies, or music. The prob­lem is that most of what’s out there which I would actu­ally want, I already have (which makes it pretty obvi­ous that most of what’s out there I cer­tainly don’t want). And to fill in the “gaps” in the lists I give to fam­ily, gen­er­al­i­ties appear “clothes, socks, books about [insert choice topic here], choco­late,” and so on.

I sup­pose my list-making method­ol­ogy works. My fam­ily mem­bers are really adept at pick­ing out gifts, and I’m more than sat­is­fied with “the haul” this year. The over­sights, in fact, aren’t in what peo­ple got me (the typ­i­cal “Santa couldn’t bring it this year, maybe next year” sit­u­a­tion many chil­dren face each Christ­mas), but rather in what I asked for.

So, that being said, here are some things I should have asked for but didn’t, sim­ply so I don’t for­get them and so that next year I can look back on this and remem­ber to think through what I ask for a bit more thor­oughly. (Also, some of these I “dropped hints for” but I don’t con­sider that to be the same as offi­cially ask­ing for some­thing. If it didn’t appear on paper or in email, it doesn’t count!

• Ten­nis shoes; the pair I have now, while won­der­fully com­fort­able, have sev­eral holes which are get­ting larger all the time.
• Light switch & out­let cov­ers; we just moved into our house in Sep­tem­ber, but we haven’t dec­o­rated yet. This gift would have been very afford­able and would have made a big dif­fer­ence in some of our rooms. I would love to replace the Catholic-kitsch “I will bless every home where a pic­ture of my heart shall be exposed and hon­ored” switch cover!
• Car main­te­nance; a gift cer­tifi­cate good for an oil change or a tire rota­tion (or to have my car’s sus­pen­sion replaced! LOL) would have been fantastic.
• Brief­case; noth­ing fancy, it doesn’t even have to be a real brief­case. I would, how­ever, greatly appre­ci­ate a way to con­ve­niently carry around my Bible, my cam­era, a note­book, and a small vari­ety of writ­ing utensils.
• Fire­proof safe box; being a home­owner, I’m start­ing to real­ize just how many doc­u­ments I have which prob­a­bly should be kept in a rather safe place…
• A paper shred­der; as an inverse of the idea just above, there are doc­u­ments which reach our trash cans which I’d feel much bet­ter about if they were cross-shredded beyond repair.
• An exter­nal hard drive; who couldn’t use another 100+ giga­bytes of storage? :)
• Elec­tric self-cleaning razor; any­thing which reduces the effort required in per­sonal main­te­nance is a good thing.

And through­out the com­ing year, I’m going to take more care­ful note of books which look inter­est­ing as I see them so that I can give peo­ple a cou­ple of months notice; appar­ently, my choices of books aren’t the most widely avail­able in the world. :)

They say hind­sight is 20/20, so what about you? Any­thing that you think you should have asked for while you had the chance but totally for­got about when the time to ask arrived? Leave a com­ment or blog your own super-early 2007 Christ­mas list.