I love a lot of things about Christmas, but one of my favorite traditions is heading into Hallmark stores and looking at all of their latest geek-tastic Christmas tree ornaments, which come in many forms, from Indiana Joneses to Millennium Falcons to miniature Pac Man video game cabinets.
These days, since the geeks are inheriting the Earth, you can now go into Target or Walmart and find all kinds of geeky ornaments, from Star Trek to Scooby Doo.
And every time I find myself in front of a display of geeky ornaments, I always stand there and play a little mental game where I pick out which ones I would buy if my wife would let me to have them.
I know. Shameful. But my wife holds a pretty tight control over how our tree looks. I think it has to do with the living room (where we keep our tree) is pretty much her domain and since we host an huge annual Christmas party every year, I think she'd rather not have all of our friends wondering why there's a Slave I on our tree, not that they'd know what it is anyway.
But that's cool. I have an entire office filled with geeky stuff and most spouses wouldn't even be cool with that, so I count myself pretty lucky.
However, there is one geeky Christmas tree ornament on our 7" artificial spruce, and that's this little guy right here...
My beautiful, frosted, blown glass Yoda is one of my most beloved Christmas ornaments, mostly because it is my only geeky ornament on the tree, but also because it was a gift from my mom and it reminds me of a snowy December in 1980, a couple of weeks before my 8th birthday, when I found one of the elusive Kenner Yoda action figures hanging on a peg in a Spencer's Gifts in a mall in Toledo, Ohio of all places.
It was a testament to how hard to find these figures were that Christmas when my mom straight up bought it for me right then and there, when everyone knows that your parents wouldn't buy you squat that close to Christmas, usually followed with a lame "Maybe Santa will bring you one," which pretty much meant "Don't hold your breath, kid."
Last year, my Mom and I were talking about past Christmas presents and some of my favorite toys and she told me how crazy I was about The Empire Strikes Back then and how she had already gotten me the Dagobah playset but couldn't for the life of her find a Yoda figure to go with it and was in a mini-panic over it. So when she saw that I had found one, she knew she had to just get it right then. It ended up working out beautifully, because now that I had the figure, I began to drool over the pciture of the Dagobah playset in the JC Penny catalog. Little did I know that it was already sitting in the back of my parent's closet.
Almost 30 years later my mom would send me this ornament, bringing back fond memories of Christmas 1980, when my mom and I bonded over one wise little green Muppet.
Also from the League:
Brian at Cool & Collected has got some mad painting skills!
Goodwill Geek makes my geeky ornament collection look lame.
Fortune and Glory (Days) might be one of my new favorite blogs.
