Season's Gamings

Are You Happy Now?

By Christmas morning, I was at peace. The things I had convinced myself that I needed, I now realized I didn't. The gifts I wanted for Christmas might not be under the tree, but I suspected that might be for the best. If I was becoming spoiled - and the evidence certainly suggested I was - then perhaps it was time for my wishes to go ungranted. It would build character, or at least give me a scrap of it.

I felt focused and relaxed. For once, I didn't even get riled at Dad's annual pronouncement that "We're going too fast! We must slow down, and savor the Unwrapping of the Presents." Liberated from desire, I just leaned back against the ottoman, listened to the fire's crackle, and took a long sip of my hot chocolate.

Toward the end of our gift exchange, my mother said that she still wanted to put up some more decorations. I looked around the living room, which already looked like my parents had looted a Marshall Field's window display. "You have to be kidding," I groaned.

"Just a few more things," my mother said. "Now that we've got this stuff out of the way, I have room for the rest of the Snow Village." She went downstairs. A few minutes later, she yelled, "Hey, guys? I could use a hand bringing these boxes up." I shuffled down to the laundry room.

"All right, where're these boxes?" I asked.

"Oh, right over there," my mother said, waving a hand toward the center of the room.

It was so cluttered that it took me a moment to figure out what she was waving at. Then, just as I made out the words "IBM Aptiva" written across the biggest box, a camera materialized in my mother's hands.

The photograph shows stunned confusion. I stand, open-mouthed and blank-faced, staring off to the right of the frame. My father grins behind me. It was the greatest Christmas surprise my parents had ever pulled off, and the last time I would be of an age where such a thing was possible.

To my parents, I suppose, it's a picture of perfect happiness. Certainly the photos that followed, showing me opening (even, God help me, hugging) the boxes, looking at my parents in wonder and embracing each of them in turn while they switched camera duties, indicate that was the case.

But the first photo is the real one; the rest are, to some extent, exaggerated for my parents' benefit. They deserved the perfect "Red Ryder BB gun" moment they had worked so hard to create, and I wanted to make it everything they imagined. So I feigned unambiguous joy when what I felt most of all was confusion.

I knew beyond doubt that I didn't deserve what my parents had given me. Looking at the computer, I realized too late why my father wanted to leaf through PC Gamer with me: He and my mother had already bought me the computer and Jedi Knight. But before they had the chance to give them to me, I pitched a fit because I thought they wouldn't.

That made that Christmas more bittersweet than usual. My parents had bought these incredible gifts for someone who spent years begging for a new computer and lashed out when he thought he wouldn't get it. The person opening them was someone else. Or at least, I wanted to be.

Rob Zacny is a freelance writer. He currently lives in Cambridge. You can find more of his work through his blog.