Your "It's a Goddamn Christmas Miracle" Quizo Update

Before we get to the meat of this week's missive, a quick request: is anyone today going to be very near the Utrecht art supply store on Broad Street? I need something from there and am not able to go into town to get it. If you can do this favor for me, I will grant you a great largesse this evening, bearing in mind that vis a vis the distressingly-specific item I require the usual true Grail/false Grail rules will apply. Please drop me a line if you are able to conveniently swing by the place.

Anyway, onwards.

The phrase in this week's title was actually spoken by me twice in the last four days. The first came on Christmas day, when for the first time in recorded memory everyone in my family got perfect gifts.

Now understand that buying gifts for my parents is alternately an exacting and excruciating process. Shopping for my mother is the former. While her tastes are so complex as to make the Minoan labyrinth look like the straightaway at Daytona, if you can hew close to certain high points - cozy British murder mysteries, Magnum PI, and the collected works of Sinbad - you're pretty much okay. Shopping for my father, on the other hand, is one of the greatest exercises in futility known to man. The house is littered with stacks of books, movies and various gadgetry that were gifts for Christmas, birthdays, Father's Days, etc, that lie unwatched, unread and unused. Not that he is rude about receiving such things, he just never seems to DO anything. Like, ever. It's quite amazing, really; my father is probably the best-read person I have ever known and I have NEVER SEEN HIM READ A BOOK. So getting gifts for Dad is quite tough as it's an amazing chore to get him something he will actually lay hands on more than once.

This year I decided to obviate both of these problems by getting something that they would BOTH use to great extent: a new television, a big flatscreen hi-def job. I had a very nice one picked out and bought up, and on Christmas I had a friend with a hatchback (so as to fit the box on the back deck) give me a ride over to the Death Star to pick it up. This was at maybe 10AM on Wednesday morning. You may recall that early on Wednesday there was a bit of bother with an ice storm, but by 10 it had gone away and everything was clear. I, however, on the way to the car, managed to find the only remaining patch of ice in all of Northeast Philadelphia, slip on it, and bang up my knee pretty badly. It didn't seize up completely until later in the day so I managed to get the TV home all right, but when my knee DID seize up later that night I was presented with a considerable problem.

Since I had long since decided to present the TV as a Santa-style come-downstairs-on-Christmas-morning-and-oh-my-god-there's-a-TV-there! sort of gift, I was left with the difficulty that once my parents had gone to sleep (at 2 in the bloody morning), I now had to not only hook up a brand new large LCD television and dispose of the old one in complete silence, but I had to do all these things on one leg. The fact that I managed to complete this Herculean task should not be understated. That part in and of itself was a minor goddamn Christmas miracle, but it did unfortunately mean that I was basically immobile on Christmas Day.

Come the blessed morn I woke up and, not wanting to ruin my Santa Claus moment, laid awake in bed for a solid two hours waiting for my parents to go downstairs so I could hear the great gasps of surprise and joy. After lying awake for two hours I heard them both go downstairs and, not hearing any gasps of any kind after about ten minutes, I hobbled my way down the stairs.

"What the FUCK?!" I said. I gesticulated wildly at the new television. "No reaction? Seriously? NOTHING? Brand new big-screen TV and it gets NO FUCKING REACTION?"

"Actually," my mother said, "it fits in with the room so well we both walked past it the first time without noticing."

"WITHOUT NOTICING?" I was still shouting, I feel perfectly reasonably.

"Without noticing, well, this is funny," my father said.

It was at this point that I stopped shouting and wildly flailing my arms about long enough to realize that in front of the Christmas tree was a complete set of brand-new golf clubs with one of the oversize decorative bows that we normally hang from the living room light fixtures stuck to it. As my father just got a new set of clubs, I just received a new golf bag from them for my birthday last month, and my mother does not play golf, these were clearly for me.

I wistfully handled the bow, looked at the TV, and said, "I should have thought of this."

"It's sure as hell not three coats," my father said.

Eventually the full-on present-opening commenced. I ended up with the clubs - which are, amusingly, decked out in white, black and orange - and a GPS for my car. My mother got the camera she's been dying for from my father. She gave him a plane ticket to go Spring Training again this year. They both got an astonishingly awesome TV from me.

Once we had coffee and breakfast, I looked at them and said, "is it just me or did everyone get absolutely perfect gifts this year?" This has never happened before, not even close.

We all agreed that everyone had.

"That," I said, "is a goddamn Christmas miracle."

My second utterance of that phrase in the last few days came last night around 7PM when I finally accepted the fact that the Eagles were going to make the playoffs in what has to be the most incredibly unlikely way possible. I had read on some football website that going into Sunday the Birds had something like a 5% chance of making the playoffs. They might have beaten the Cowboys, sure. And the Bears or the Vikings MIGHT have lost, just slightly maybe, and there was a very poorly-packed snowball's chance in hell that the Buccaneers would blow it as two touchdown favorites against the Raiders, but there was basically ABSOULTEY NO WAY IN THE ENTIRE MULTIVERSE that all three of these things would happen.

By kickoff at 4:15 not only had both the Bears and Vikings lost, but the Bucs somehow DID blow it to the Raiders, and as the game was starting I sent around a text to my friends urging them to contribute to a fund that would allow us to send Al Davis a quart of fresh human blood as thanks for opening a playoff window for the Eagles. (Come on, you know he's a vampire. Or that he at least bathes in the stuff.)

The Eagles had a window. The stars had all aligned, save one. They just had to beat the Cowboys and incredibly, unbelievably, the Eagles would make the playoffs. It was going to be rough, though. The Cowboys are no pushovers. They're still a fantastically-talented football team, and the Eagles policy of "never cover the tight end" would only make someone as good as Jason Witten even more dangerous. And, hey, Tony Romo can't dick it up in December forever, can he?

About 90 minutes later, after Pacman's second mistake in 90 seconds had given the Eagles a total of ten free points, I sat there open-mouthed, staring at my television in disbelief. Eventually I found words and said aloud to my otherwise empty living room, "you've gotta be fucking KIDDING me."

As halftime struck I called my father, in Florida with my mother to visit his aunt.

"The Cowboys have basically quit," he said. "The game is pretty much over. But don't discount Andy Reid's ability to fuck this up."

"Even he would have to try pretty hard to blow this one," I said.

"This is the Eagles," he said. "Never forget that." So I went to watch the second half, waiting for the Eagles to blow their lead and return to normalcy.

When Merrill said, "there's a timeout on the field! The score is, and we are not drunk, 34-3 Eagles!" I realized that this was actually going to happen and I was possessed by a strange euphoria.

After the game ended I just sat there, not quite comprehending the ridiculous sequence of events that had led to this point. I looked over at the tree, all lit up, thought about a happy family with perfect gifts, two weeks off from work, and the Eagles in the playoffs on a new big screen TV, and just smiled and again spoke to the empty room:

"It's a goddamn Christmas miracle."

If all those things happening at once aren't that, folks, I don't know what is.

JLK