Thank you, Home Depot. Thank you for selling an animated holiday Tyrannosaur.

One devil medallion and a cut-up t-shirt later, and I’m now the proud owner of a 42” Dinosaur Dracula, Christmas edition.

Life is weird, and good.

Mad, hysterical love to the few of you who tipped me off. And to the guy at Home Depot who so generously offered to climb up a giant orange ladder so I could buy the store display version. (They were otherwise sold out.) Best $65 bucks I ever spent.

It was Christmas Day, 1986. Maybe ’87. Let’s say ’87.

Thank God for my friend across the street. As mentioned before, my family celebrates on Christmas Eve and celebrates it hard. Christmas Day was never much of anything in our house, and in some ways, it was actually depressing. The “post-holiday blues” are familiar to many, but it hits so much harder when you feel it on Christmas morning.

But my best friend’s family was different. They did nothing on the Eve, and everything on the Day. Growing up, I spent many of my Christmases at his house, to the point where his aunts and uncles felt like my aunts and uncles.

The way his family celebrated was so foreign to me. For dessert, there’d always be these enormous plates of salted green apple slices. (They were better than they sound.) The atmosphere was so much quieter than my own family’s party, in part because there were less people, but also because nobody at his house was Italian.

A key part of these visits was to compare Christmas presents with my buddy. Honestly, I was there to brag. It’s not like he didn’t get good stuff, but his parents were much more practical. He played sports, so he got tons of sports equipment. Great in the long run, but not so great for showy boasts. He also wasn’t at all greedy or materialistic, even at a young age. If he even once made a Christmas list, I’d be surprised.

Not that it was a competition, but I’d grown accustomed to besting him on the fronts that mattered most to me: Toys and video games. He didn’t care enough about those things to have a lot of them, and I sure didn’t mind my role as “boy with the better toys.”

Well, in 1987, the fucker finally beat me… Read More…

Though the hat and binoculars were clearly meant for yesterday’s Safari Man, Dino Drac is quick to appropriate them. This could mean that Safari Man has already become lunch, but — and far more likely — Dino Drac just likes hats.

Turns out that the binoculars are only for show. They don’t actually enable Dino Drac to see faraway things more clearly. This irritates him to no end. Would prop binoculars really cost that much less than a working pair? There comes a point where making prop versions of things just seems excessive.

Luckily, that hat makes up for the binoculars. Dino Drac fancies himself a modern day Indy, but I get more of a Bogart vibe. A Safari Man at the Advent Calendar beats a roast beef at the Ritz.