Last Christmas we bought my daughter a cheap(ish) laptop. At the time she was playing casual games like Minecraft, and she didn’t need much processing power. Lately she’s been getting into more intensive games through Steam. They need more power than her computer can really handle. I bought her one a few months ago, and while she was able to play it, the playing speed was super slow and the graphics were terrible.

Steam had a big Black Friday sale, and I bought her a couple of games. But since I bought them through the website that she plays her games on, she automatically knew I had purchased them. Christmas came early for her, or so we thought.

Her little laptop wasn’t able to handle them at all. They wouldn’t play in the least little bit.

That really sucked, as while the games were on sale, they weren’t cheap. They were going to be her big ticket Christmas items. She’ll get a few other small things, but that’s it.  And now she can’t even play them.

I promised her we’d look into buying her a desktop that could handle these games, but not now. Maybe for her birthday or something (if her grandparents chipped in.) The thing is, I’m a Mac guy. I’ve been using Apple products for a good 15 years now. Macs are great for many things, but games aren’t one of them. Macs also don’t like you to tinker with them. They are designed to plug in and just work.  I’m perfectly happy with that. While I used to be someone who knew a little something about computers, I am no longer that guy.  I have no idea what the latest processors are, how much RAM you need, etc.

That made looking online to determine what kind of a computer she needed extremely difficult. Luckily my brother’s boy is a hardcore gamer, and I figured he could help me with the specs. At first he sent me a bunch of information that went over my head. Then he sent me some links to computers he thought were reasonably priced.  His version of reasonable and my version are very different things. I was not prepared to spend $1,000 so my daughter could play some video games. I told him that we needed to go a little cheaper, and he said he’d look into it.

I mentioned all this to my brother, just in casual conversation; I wasn’t expecting him to do anything about it. But then he mentioned that his son had given him a very nice computer a couple of years ago. My brother used to be really into World of Warcraft, but he hasn’t played in a long while and doesn’t plan to return to it, so, he said, she could have that one. He needed to run that by his son as it was a gift, but he didn’t think that would be a problem.

It wasn’t, and yesterday he delivered us a nice computer. Then the bomb dropped.  It didn’t have Wi-Fi. My brother always connected via an Ethernet cord and didn’t need Wi-Fi.  Our router is downstairs in my wife’s sewing room. Daughter wanted to use her computer upstairs. That would mean dragging over 100 feet of Ethernet cable across the house, up the stairs, and then back across the house. That just wasn’t going to work. 

I chatted with my nephew’s girlfriend, who is a bit of a computer nerd. She knew there were little devices you could buy and plug in to give it Wi-Fi, but she’d not had good luck with them. She suggested I just upgrade the motherboard and get one with Wi-Fi capabilities.  Then she said she was thinking of upgrading her motherboard, and she could give us her old one.

That was a little over my head, but she seemed to think it would work.  Then she called back a little later.  She’d decided she was going to buy her boyfriend a brand-new computer, and we could have his old one.  It had Wi-Fi, and it was better than my brother’s old one.

She brought it over tonight.  I had to move some desks around and spend way too much time trying to get it all set up, but it plays her games beautifully.  She’s one happy camper. 

And so am I.

Ever since my wife and I got married, some twenty odd years ago, we’ve bought a real tree for Christmas. There is just something special about a real tree that beats a fake one every time. To me, real trees look better, they smell better, and I even like the way the pine needles fall onto the floor.

There is a tree farm about twenty miles west of our little town, and we go there every year. It is one of those places that has multiple plots of land. Each year they allow tree hunters to go into one section, choose their tree, and cut it down. Then when the season is done, they plant new trees in that section and allow them to grow for a couple of seasons. Then the next season the next section is cut down, and so forth.

Once you choose your tree, they give you a little tag, and you can go shop for ornaments or whatever while the workers cut the tree, put it into a little shaking machine to free any loose needles; then they shoot it through a netting machine and place it in the line for you to pick up.  We then take our tag, pull the car around, and they tie it to the roof.

The way they are supposed to tie it is they open our doors, run the twine through the car’s interior, then over the tree, and tie it all down. The guy must have been distracted when he tied ours.  I stopped off at a QuickTrip to get a drink and a snack and quickly realized I was trapped inside the car. The guy had looped the string through my window instead of opening the door, and thus the string had essentially locked me in!

The wife got my drink, and then when we got home, she cut me loose.

When I was a kid, my father owned a copy of the John Denver and the Muppets album A Christmas Together. We would play it over and over again around the Christmas holidays. It features fun versions of Christmas classics like “Little Saint Nick” and the “12 Days of Christmas” (with Miss Piggy adding a zealous “ba-dum, bum, bum” to her Five Gold Rings segment). Plus an assortment of Denver-led ballads. His version of “Silent Night” where he sings it in the original German and explains the origins of the song, tears me up every time.

Anyway, I now own that album on CD, and it is always the album we play while we’re putting up our Christmas tree. We don’t have a lot of traditions in our family, but that is one of my favorites. Stringing lights up and putting ornaments on the tree while The Muppets sing silly songs and John Denver makes me cry always brings in the spirit of the season for me.