TBT #69: My 22nd December

I have only lived through 21 Decembers in all my life. Thinking about this, it does not seem like a lot. 21 is not a big number. Comparing it to other things, it is less than (for example) the number of days in a month (even February!), the average class size in my elementary school (32!), the number of Jewish people it took build the pyramids, and the number of James Bond films. Really, the number of Decembers in my past is so low thought I could, perhaps, recap the events of every single December since my birth. And because I am still feeling the burn from writing a ridiculous number of words in November (70,000!), I think that is what I will do. I do have to emphasize that not all of these recaps will be entirely accurate or even honest, as I have a tendency to lie about my past and insert, for example, giant robot battles where there may have in actuality been no giant robot battles. I am writing this for the purposes of entertainment only and those of you looking to write a factual biography on the life and times of Matthew Elliott should probably ignore this edition of The Best Things and instead focus your research on the imdb entry for Danny Trejo, replacing every instance of the name “Danny Trejo” with “Matthew Elliott.” I feel it’s likely that my life will mirror very closely the life of Mr. Trejo. He is the hispanic actor in that movie you saw.

And that’s just about the Best Thing Ever for Friday, December 2, 2005.

December, 1983

Okay, this is a bad place to start I have no idea what happened during this month. I was exactly 20 days old when this month started and thus generally my life consisted of burping and pooping and grabbing every adult’s index finger, a gesture they took as a sign of affection. It was not actually a sign of affection in my case; I really wanted to eat those fingers. Also I assume that it was during this first December that my family truly began to love and appreciate me for the person I was. I know the romantic notion of child-rearing calls for an immediate love between parent and child right after the birthing, but I can’t imagine anyone would love their baby right away. They are kind of ugly and loud right after they are born. I imagine having a baby to be kind of like owning a pick-up truck in a big city. At first you are like “Wow, this baby is loud and bulky and really prevents me from attending classy shindigs” but then later you have to haul some lumber or something and you’re like “Shit, where would I be without the carrying-capacity of this child?”

December, 1984

An ominous year, as it is of course the year George Orwell predicted that the government would spontaneously turn itself into a giant boot and smash all of our faces again and again until we collectively loved a mustachioed man. Thankfully this prediction, like his other prediction about barnyard animals becoming politically aware, did not come to pass. As a result, I imagine the Holiday Season in 1984 was a non-stop party as everybody was excited that they could still count on the government as a moral and representative tool of the citizenry!

December, 1985

This was the year Back to the Future came out and though I was only three and did not see it until I was much older, I like to think this film had a tremendous influence on my development. Were it not for Marty McFly and Doc Brown and their 2.21 Jiggawatts I would probably still regard time travel as a harmless and potentially fun activity, similar to bowling or jumping into a pit of colourful balls. Instead, now I know that time travel will inevitably result in people disappearing from photographs and also maybe bizarre incestual relationships being forged. And also, later, an adventure in the old west and a time travelling train.

December, 1986

By this December, I had a brother. His name was Chris! And it remains Chris to this day. Continuing the trend of remembering nothing from my early childhood, I have no idea what that was like for me. But apparently he was kind of a weird kid who went through a long and drawn-out period where he thought he was a dog and walked around chewing on a face cloth and growling at people. So I bet I thought he was pretty cool.

December, 1987

Now 4 years old I began to notice popular culture. I really wanted to watch G.I. Joe but my mom would not let me because she did not like the idea of people shooting each other, even if it was done in the name of defeating people who named themselves after snakes and wore hoods! This sort of thinking prevailed through much of my early childhood, as mom forbade both Chris and I from having any sort of ‘realistic’ looking gun toys and watching TV and movies that featured excessive violence and killing. Mom did a good job of keeping this sort of stuff away from Chris and I, but seemingly gave up after the birth of my second brother (more on that later!) who was watching R-rated movies by his third birthday.

December, 1988

I’m in Kindergarten! This is the year when I made a plate for my grandmother. It reads “Matthew Elliott, 1988″ on it. It also has a picture of a rainbow. My grandmother gave this plate ‘back’ to me a year ago, after which my mother explained that I made it during my “rainbow phase.” Apparently I went through a phase where I only drew rainbows. I have no idea how to feel about this as I had no idea I even HAD phases of art. I’m not an artist! I suppose after my rainbow phase I went through a stick figure phase before finally maturing into my current phase, wherein I draw geometric cubes and five-point stars in the margins of notebook paper.

December, 1989

My Grade 1 teacher was Mrs. Russell. I think my Kindergarten Teacher was Mrs. Bennett but I can’t really remember because I was really busy drawing rainbows at the time. I really don’t think that’s such a terrible phase to go through. What OTHER kind of drawing allows for the use of ALL the colours? In any case, December in Grade 1 was a good time for me as I was really into the whole Santa Claus concept. I got Chris into it, too, in such a way that we would sit on the couch watching TV and whenever we would see something we wanted we would yell “GET DAT!!” really loud in the hopes that Mom & Dad would hear and, I guess, get that. For us.

December, 1990

My brother Tim was born three months prior, in September. He is reading this right now. Hey, Tim. What’s up? I hope everything is going good with you. If you ever need advice on, like, girls or how to drive, please ask me. I don’t really know a lot about girls but I do know how to drive. It is easy. In any case, Tim was born and thus kicked off a glorious decade of childhood, where the 3 Elliott boys would fight each other for 60% of the day, sleep for 20% of the day, and think of ways to start more fights during the remainder. I actually generally stayed out of the actual fighting, instead opting to socially engineer situations where Tim and Chris would fight each other, and I would hang back and then call mom when one or both of them looked seriously hurt. My grade 2 teacher was Ms. Faucher and at the end of the year the class got her a plant and she cried for like three hours.

December, 1991

Eight years old, I suddenly became very creative when it came to Christmas. I had been enamored with Batman, as most kids are at this age. Only I wasn’t really into the Animated Series Batman, as mom thought it was way too dark for us kids. Rather, I watched the old-style live-action Batman. The one with the weird painted eyebrows on the mask and a ridiculous number of episodes focused on the evil King Tut. I decided that since Santa was, you know, magic, he probably was not limited to toys that appeared in the Sears Wish Book — he could make ANYTHING. So I asked for, like, Batgirl’s House. And other such playsets that did not exist. I did not get any of them.

December, 1992

Bolstered by the fact that none of my magical presents had appeared in my stocking, I began to sort of doubt this whole Santa Claus business. My teacher in Grade 4 was Mrs. Morton, and Grade 4 was really the year in which I came into my own as a student. I remember really struggling with math in the first and second grades, but suddenly in Grade 3 - with Mrs. Titford, a name only funny in retrospect — and especially 4, I just GOT it. I think I was spurned on by the fact that Mrs. Morton let us play Oregon Trail and Cross Country Canada on the classroom computer if we finished our math early. I loved those games, especially Oregon Trail! I don’t care what anybody says — asking the Native Americans for help crossing the rivers was a stupid idea. You should ALWAYS ford them!

December, 1993

I decided that I had had enough of this whole Santa Business and explained to mom, while we drove to the mall, why the whole idea was just ridiculous. “There is no way he could fly around the world in one night!” I exclaimed, as Chris slept in the back seat. “And furthermore, many aspects of his appearance and personality seem to have been developed solely for the purpose of promoting Coca-Cola!” Mom eventually relented and admitted that she and dad were, in fact, putting out the presents and eating the cookies and drinking some of the water we left for the reindeer. She told me that I was “in on the secret” now and that it was my duty to lie to my brothers in an effort to make sure they believed in the magic as long as possible. I think I may have, in fact, done this, but it still lead to a weird trend in our family where I was always the one to hold onto my childhood the longest. I came to terms with the whole Santa-not-being-real thing much later than Chris, who was probably 7 or 8. Tim, meanwhile, probably learned at the age of 4 when Chris told him, laughed, and then threw some of his toys down the stairs.

December, 1994

We got a new computer! Or maybe that was the Christmas before. I can’t really remember. It wasn’t the first computer the family owned, as for a long time we had a giant and heavy 286 with TWO 5-inch floppy drives. It ran only DOS and I used it to play a lot of games that involved finding three envelopes with clues in them and then using those clues to go fight a scientist. The fight consisted of pressing spacebar. And then winning. The new computer was much better! It was a 486 and ran Windows 3.1 and it had a background image of Rafiki from the Lion King, which Dad thought was just so cool.

December, 1995

The computer in the basement begins to consume me, as I have discovered IRC (an acronym that stands for social death) and started discussing the finer points of pro wrestling and pop music with people all over the world! Middle School was a great time for me musically, as everyone liked both Offspring and Green Day and that was that. There really wasn’t a lot of debate or musical elitism, except for the occasional discussion of whether Dookie was better than Smash, or vice versa. Generally, though, we just discussed how hilarious Offspring’s “Bad Habit” was, what with all the swear words!

December, 1996

Still spending days and years on the computer, only now running a brand new pirated copy of Windows 95! My parents worry that I am descending into a corrupt world of pornography and anti-social attitudes. They are right, but I am also learning a whole lot about HTML and QBasic, things that make me money to this very day! Christmas in my computer years was an odd time, not only because I was remarkably socially awkward but also because I watched as my brothers were still getting awesome toy after awesome toy while I was getting… shirts. And CD-ROMs. And Triominos.

December, 1997

Puberty: that was a rough go.

December, 1998 - December, 2001

Ah, high school. During my high school days I: pined over a girl I had known in my younger days, discovered my back was crooked, lost an e-girlfriend to e-cheating in an e-chatroom, had major surgery and decided what I really wanted to be known as, around the school, was a badass loner with a heart of gold. I do not think I was able to achieve this, however, as my tendency to hang out with people I met in Enriched Math Class probably pushed more towards the total nerd end of the spectrum. All the Christmasses during this period are something of a blur, and I say that not only because I am sick of writing this article but also because I really changed very little during my high school years. I went from an anti-social nerd guy to an anti-social nerd guy who, inexplicably, edited the sports section of the second biggest newspaper in Oakville and got to go to Ivor Wynn stadium and walk on the field and interview football players even though I did not, really, understand the game of football. It was a weird transition.

December, 2002

I came home from UNIVERSITY! I guess I grew up a lot in my first four months at university. My early opinion that I was not really a drinker or a partier was quickly erased when I went drinking and partied. Despite my best efforts to remain kind of anti-social — I stayed in my room and played Super Mario Sunshine for much of the first month — I eventually developed many long-standing relationships. Most of these relationships were forged solely with people who lived within 30 feet of me, so it did not require much effort, which was nice. Coming home, I was proud to have actual stories to tell people about my university experience. Unfortunately, telling people you drank some and went to parties in university does not tend to impress them any. “Yes,” they would say, “but how are your classes going?” And then I would answer, “Oh, I kind of hate my major!” Because I did. I really hated my major!

December, 2003

Already hating my second major (English; the first was Journalism), I came home again, less full of enthusiasm. For some reason I assumed I would not be affected by the second-year slump of university. I guess this too is typical, because I WAS. It did not help that I was coming off a break-up and also did not have a dog at home for the first time in ten years. I had partied and drank, but it was done with much less enthusiasm than in first year.

December, 2004

Last year! How time flies! Third year of university was much better as I unloaded some excess baggage, finally settled into a major that did not totally disagree with me (History!) and actually sort of decided that I maybe possibly want to be a writer in the future. I am still working on that one. But the hallmark of this past December was the time in which I fought giant robots. At first the people watching said I stood no chance but then I proved to them that the human spirit will always triumph over technology because technology cannot love or be loved. Plus it is powered by batteries whereas I am powered by, like, air and food. Which means I can just hang out with a granola bar and some oxygen and wait until the robot runs out of batteries and then I can drive a bulldozer into it and push it off a cliff. This is the best strategy for beating robots over your holiday season.

In Conclusion

I realize, looking back, that I did not so much provide recaps for my past Decembers as much as I sort of glossed over my general state of mind at that time in my life. I hope none of you are too disappointed by this turn of events. Honestly, I found that in trying to recap my Decembers (and therefore my Christmases) I was faced with two major challengers. The first is that I really don’t remember these things as well as I ought to. And the second is that, well, one of December’s hallmarks is that it is a remarkably stable month. And maybe that explains the lack of specific memory. Christmas is such a beloved time of year because it is so damn predictable. You know that when it hits December you will start hearing the same songs, seeing the same decorations, watching the same TV shows and, come Christmas day, doing the same things that you have done, with the same people, for your entire life. Christmas is constant, largely unchanging and great for it. While that might not make for a compelling recap article, it does make for the best damn Holiday of the year.

Here’s to hoping for more of the same in 2005,

Matt