Christmas Tale II

I did a bad thing. Perhaps more accurately, we did a bad thing. My younger brothers and I, that is.

My mother is and always has been really gung-ho about all things Christmas. She loved to decorate and plan and host Christmas Eve parties and spent extravagantly on presents for all six of us.

Pursuant to her being so fired up for Christmas, she would frequently do much of her shopping early even going so far as to wrapping the presents and have them under the tree by Thanksgiving weekend.

One year, I got the bright idea that if we carefully snipped the the tape at the end of the box gifts we could see what we got. Soon, it evolved into actually taking the toy out of the box and playing with it. Sometimes for weeks. I would then return it to the box shortly before Christmas.

We owned an Intellivision gaming system. This was the state of the art computer gaming system at the time and all my Atari friends were rather jealous.


Naturally, many of our "group" gifts were games for the system and said games came in a very distinguishable box that was obvious as to its contents even when wrapped.

So one Black Friday I slit the tape, slid out the box and found Pitfall! Yes!!

Pitfall represented The Game that we wanted that year. As excited as if we got a an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle with a Compass in the Stock (ref), I opened the box, grabbed the cartridge and slid the empty box back in its packaging. We had that the cartridge in the system in a matter of minutes and played for hours on end, day after day.

Soon we were expertly navigating rope swings over crocodile pits, ladders into sub-terranean passageways and stinging scorpions. In fact, we played so much on our ill-gotten game that we even began to grow bored with it.

Flash forward to Christmas Eve and I expertly slid the cartridge back into its box packaging and placed box back in the undisturbed Christmas wrapping with a fresh pad of tape.

The next morning we opened our gift, feigned surprise and pretended to eagerly await its play. As my youngest brother easily moved through level after level without so much as losing one guy, my mother remarked, "Its amazing to me how quickly you guys get the hang of these games."

If she only knew.