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The presents at a Carvey Christmas are a combination of gifts based on lists exchanged via email that contain items like A Red Dragon from the Beyond as well as things like Dr. Seuss books, practical items purchased at Costco (always at a two for one bargain), RTE (Remember the Eggnog – meaning that the gift is something embarrassing found in the basement like old exercise tapes from the 1980s), things that fit into the stockings like gum and rubber bands, and items designated for the cats. The unwrapping ceremony can take anywhere from seven to twenty hours depending upon the stamina and will of the participants. In this case it was broken into two segments because Nick and Christina were not present for the first half of the ceremony.

I was happy to have received a large volume of presents including a laser level, lots of spices including a two foot high pepper shaker filled with some all purpose spices that you need to grind onto your food to season it. The net tally of gifts was such that we needed to take three trips to the car to port the gifts as we left with full cardboard boxes to hold them all. Some highlights of the gifts included two teapots, Craisins, two things of salad dressing, and lots of gift certificates to various venues like Whole Foods, portable CD/MP3 players, rechargeable batteries with a charger, popover tools like a muffin tin and popover mix, and chewable Vitamin C.

After a long phase I unwrapping ceremony we took a break to watch The Stepford Wives which we had purchased on Pay Per View to avoid the horrors of modern in your face advertising. It was a good little flick about modifying your wife or gay lover into a perfect citizen lover by turning them into a robot. It was a good companion piece to iRobot, which we watched last night and had a far less sinister plot. But basically both movies came down to someone going into the right spot to turn off all the robots to return them to happy robots and free people. I read iRobot by Asimov a few years back and I thought that the movie added a lot of depth to some of the concepts and stories from that book of short stories.

My favorite undertone was the idea that robots programmed to protect us would eventually come to the conclusion that the only way to do so would be to take over and create a totalitarian government controlled by robots because we will always try to kill each other through asinine wars for money, power, and cultural dominance. It scored extra points for being animal farm like with an Allegory. The Stepford Wives didn’t measure up to iRobot partially because it wasn’t clear whether the wives were androids or wives with chips implanted in their brains. It seemed like someone couldn’t make-up their minds.

Everyone disappeared at about seven PM. First Sarah’s parents went to pick-up Nick and Christina and then Dave and Andrew went back to drop Dave back in Boston. So Sarah and I turned back to the television for entertainment. Sarah was excited to see The Sound of Music but it had tons of cheesy commercials. Luckily another network was showing Scent of a Woman. So we watched both movies simultaneously switching back and forth whenever a commercial appeared until her parents got home at which point the commercials started to synchronize to be at the same time so we finished off watching The Sound of Music while opening a second round of presents due to Nick and Christina’s arrival.

Ultimately Christmas ended on Sunday morning. We had only left the Carvey home once to drive to Boston to pick-up Dave. Sarah’s mom made popovers with a little help from me while Sarah’s dad watched Legends of the Fall. The popovers were superb but we did need to read an obscure scientific cookbook to determine how to optimize them for next time because they hadn’t risen very high. We also felt duped by the popover mix in a bag because we determined that popover mix is flour and salt. The rest is adding eggs and milk with the largest task being the ability to create a hot air balloon out of the dough by heating the internal areas of the popover hot enough to create steam but not so hot as to let the steam escape.

Somewhere in the mix we watched Don't Tell mom the babysitter is dead and parts of Twelve Monkeys. We had steak on both Friday night and Saturday night, both nights in front of a movie with lots of commercials.

I was getting ancy in the morning as we had initially intended to play the game that I bought for Nick and Christina where you choose which item is not like the other three. It was too late when they came at 1:00 to play and when the football started I wanted to watch the Indianapolis Colts Vs. the San Diego Chargers game. Unfortunately due to a right wing or potentially a left wing conspiracy the game was not available on any channel and the owners of the rights to show the game, CBS, decided to sell Ronco knives and show figure skating during the time slot. This didn’t make any sense to me because they had a perfect opportunity to show two of the best AFC teams, both with 11-3 records play head to head. The game was great had I been able to watch it. In the final minutes the Colts tied it to allow them to win in overtime. I would probably have had better luck trying to watch it in France.

So Sarah and I packed the Passat until it was brimming with both the gifts and a large lamp laid across my lap. We rushed off to the gym to work out and I hoped that the Sports Network at the gym would be kind enough to show the Colts / Chargers game. They were also showing figure skating or some other awful content. My guess is that the suppression of a good football game on network television is the first wave of the robots trying to take over the planet. We need to stop them!