All I Want for Christmas

Hint: It's not grandma's porcelain teacups

When a loved one asks you what you want for Christmas, what do you say?

Are you Mr. Easy? “I’ll love whatever you give me.’’

Are you Johnny Gets It? “My health, my family, my friends.’’

Are you a goober? “My two front teeth.’’

Everybody wants something. This is undeniable. If it weren’t, the land wouldn’t be dotted with storage facilities. Dotted? It’s pocked, littered, larded and fat with concrete cubicles for hiding all the crap we wanted, until we didn’t. POD bless America.

Read this, and weep:

Nearly 10 percent of the American people rent a storage facility. According to urban and tech writer Patrick Sisson, “One in 11 Americans pays an average of $91.14 per month to use self-storage, finding a place for the material overflow of the American dream.” Storage facilities are a $38 billion industry, one of the surest business investments in America, with an annual growth rate of over seven percent. In 1984, there were about 6,600 self-storage buildings in the nation. Now there are approximately 50,000 such facilities in the U.S. (900 per state), with a combined storage capacity of 2.3 billion square feet.

According to 2018 statistics, there are more than 23 million individual storage units in the United States. That’s one for every 14 Americans. (Governing.com)

They are so onerous and omnipresent, people live in the damned things.

Is this you? Are you a POD-ster? If Johnny Thinwallet had to spend $91 a month to store stuff he never used, he’d find a cave in Borneo (with a two-car garage) and live there.

For years, when asked what I wanted for Christmas, I’d say “Time.’’ One year, my mother obliged. She sent me my grandfather’s pocket watch. It’s still on the corner of my desk. A perfect gift. Meaningful, sentimental, ingenious. I look at it every day.

I’ve tried to shift away from Stuff. Giving and getting. “Something I can drink, smoke or hit with a 9-iron’’ had been my stock answer. Then my space got jammed with bourbon, cigars and ProV1s. Luckily, none of that stuff required a POD. All vanished sooner or later, especially the Pro-Vs. Golf balls, in fact, could be the perfect gift. No one keeps them for life.

Now, I’m into “experiences.’’ In the past few years, I have given theatre tickets, dinner reservations and trips, ie airfare for my wife to fly to NY to visit our son and his bride. I also like giving recurring gifts: Flowers four times a year, say. Last year, it was gift boxes from something called FabFitFun, 4x a year, filled with women-esque stuff like cosmetics and jewelry.

Point is, Stuff bugs me. Ever move? Of course you have. Ever lug Stuff from basement to basement? Ever wonder what the hell?

• Dishes that their owners didn’t want, so they figured we would. Well, we wouldn’t.

Great-grandma’s set of porcelain tea cups. Awesome.

• Stuff we never use but can’t bear to ditch. My Electric Football game is now living in its fifth basement. God help me.

• Boxes. Mountains of boxes, containing essentials such as junior high yearbooks. I have every award I’ve ever won, right down to a letter-jacket letter from high school wrestling. Go ahead. Tell me you willfully threw yours out. Liar.

Stuff multiplies, it surely does. It reproduces. What do you get when you put a box of photographs in the same dark room with a box of baby clothes? You get a set of encyclopedias.

It doesn’t take long for the Stuff to simply overwhelm you. It’s like a sci-fi movie where the villains are swiftly replicating mutants. You think you can beat Stuff, until the moment you go running and screaming outta the basement, chased by boxes of Thanksgiving decorations.

That’s where the PODs come in. That’s when the Got Junk folks come around, with their smug, knowing smiles. I consider those folks in the same league with neighborhood kids who appear with blowers and shovels after the blizzard o’ the century.

And so we have storage units, the greatest tribute to consumer craziness ever. Our lust for Stuff is topped only by our refusal to chuck Stuff out. Don’t tell me I don’t need my Wayne Gretzky Tabletop Hockey Game.

What do we propose to do about it, Mobsters?

Christmas is here. It can’t be helped. What are you doing to help put PODs outta business? I’ll throw out my mountain of Strat-O-Matic baseball game cards if you’ll heave that box filled with junk from all those Disney vacations. Do no tell me your heart smiles at the sight of the Goofy water bottle. That’s unacceptable.

Now, then. . .

ON A FAR MORE HOPEFUL NOTE. . . Today is the shortest day of the year. December 21, the winter solstice:

The Northern Hemisphere receives the most indirect sunlight, due to Earth's tilt on its axis, which is about 23.5 degrees. The December solstice is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. As the planet moves around the sun, each hemisphere experiences winter when it's tilted away from the sun and summer when it's tilted toward the sun.

The big positive in this is, tomorrow we start going the other way. We gain a minute of sunlight every day until June 21, which also happens to be the best day of the year, every year. Anybody who ever had a parent tell them to come home when it got dark understands this simple fact.

It’s not the cold that slays me. It’s the almost-daily gray and the 16 hours of darkness. I don’t know how people live any further north than Dayton. Or why. Sorry, but there is nothing “cozy’’ or god help me, “romantic’’ about cold and dark. It’s just cold and dark.

THE GIO VIDEO. . . My pal the TV talk show host Thom Brennaman (Chatterbox Sports, Apple podcasts) alerted me to the exchange between former Man Gio Bernard and media asking him about his part in Tampa’s botched fake punt Sunday. It was designed to be a direct snap to Bernard; Gio didn’t get the memo.

What ensued postgame was uncomfortable for everyone. Gio took full blame. That didn’t appease the cameras and the microphone people, who wanted to know why the mess-up happened. The resulting back and forth didn’t do the heathen media any favors.

One: I dunno about now, but Bernard was as stand-up as it gets when he played here.

Two: My brethren and sis-tren needed to give it a rest. NFL players might be required to be present during selected open-locker room times, such as after games and several times during the week. They’re not required to provide answers the media considers satisfactory.

From a Yahoo! sports column on the subject:

“He's a human being. That fact seems completely lost in the interaction. It comes across that the reporters wanted something from Bernard, and damn if they aren't going to get it.

“Journalism requires first and foremost great curiosity, but almost as important, an ability to foster and maintain relationships. Insulting a man in a low moment because you demand he explain his mistake seems completely antithetical to good relationship-building.’’

Bingo.

Here’s the vid. Tell me what you think.

PLEASE SHARE if you like what you read in This Space. Tell everyone you know and. . . you know the rest. Thank youse.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . SS Johnny reunites with Stevie and Broooce. The result is pleasing.