5 For Friday: My Christmas Wish List

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I just barely got my Christmas tree, y’all.

There’s shopping to be done.

I have probably heard Feliz Navidad on the radio twice, three times tops.

I did walk around Walmart late at night with a Santa hat on, but that doesn’t really hold a lot of eggnog compared to the other evidence stacked against me.

It’s like I’m an atheist, or one of those liberals who wants to take all the Christ out of holiday stuff.

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I’m really not a liberal or a Christ-taker-outer.

A good place to start might be to distribute my Christmas wish list. Not for the kids, or world peace, but for me. Junk I want.

Feel free to sign up for whichever you think you can cover. In the case of duplicates, I’ll simply cash them in for gift cards and apply them to my 2013 birthday wish list.

Now that the formalities are out of the way …

1. Zephyrs or Aguilas cap

The Zephyrs were Denver’s minor-league baseball team before my beloved Rockies came along. They wore my favorite colors, blue and green. A Zephyr is a west wind. It’s also a train, I think.

They used to play in Mile High Stadium, and my friends Nate and Ray and I went to a day game there once, against the Louisville Redbirds.

I had a Zs cap when I moved to North Carolina, a fitted jobbie that really didn’t fit me, and I lost it my first week of school. Here’s how:

Southern teacher: Son, you intend on keeping that baseball cap?

Western boy unversed in Southern etiquette: Uh, yeah.

That teacher took my cap, which was never to be seen again. I swear it’s probably still in a rusty drawer somewhere on the Garinger campus.

The Aguilas are a Dominican baseball team. I didn’t get to check out a game there, because they didn’t allow us out of the resort. I would have taken a burro ride to a Dominican baseball game without a doubt.

It’s best I was quarantined in the land of Rum y Coca and free buffets.

2. Linen suit

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I seriously considered buying one in Punta Cana. It was a pant/shirt set, for $94, which is like 3.2 billion pesos. What says Island Cool like white linen? Roomy, comfy pants that still look classy. A bad shirt, with buttons and pleats, and/or a loose-fitting, cool-looking sports coat.

Then I realized I’d more likely be mistaken for Tattoo on Fantasy Island more often than James Bond in such a getup.

Still, I’d wear one.

3. shaving mirror

Just realized the first four items on my Christmas list are Dominican-related. Don’t you hate it when someone goes on a trip and won’t shut the #@^! up about it?

It was a makeup mirror at the resort, but it was awesome. It magnified my mug by like 239 times. Scary, but it allowed me to shave this ridiculous jawline beard I decided to grow because I could shave so concisely.

(It’s gone now. But if I had one of those mirrors, I could do all kinds of ridiculous things with my face.)

4. Bottle of rum

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My Coke Zero misses some rum. I was a two-beers-a-year kind of guy before Punta Cana. Still am, but I do like me some rum in that Coca.

Rumor has it there was a bottle of complimentary rum in my room, but my roomie must have stashed it in his carry-on before I even had a chance to take my straw hat off and settle in.

In any event, I feel like I loved Coke Zero before, and now, it’s just … not.the.same.

A bottle would do me for like, a month. I swear. It doesn’t even have to be the good stuff, because I have no idea what the good stuff is.

5. A baseball mitt

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I lost mine. I don’t know where, I don’t know how. It was probably for the best, though. I’ve had a lot of bad things happen to me when wearing that glove. Two errors in one inning in a high school JV game that activated a seldom-used rule about a team forfeiting if it can’t get three outs in 30 minutes.

That black Ken Griffey Jr. model had one good memory attached – a nifty grab I made of a screaming foul ball at a Chattanooga Lookouts game made with baby Grace on my hip. It was also the glove I wore when I leaped to get a ball at a Greenville Drive game, and wound up landing on top of Marie. Elise wound up with the ball in the row above us. Marie was fine, too, after an inning or three.

So, yeah. I definitely need a glove. A comfy Zephyrs lid, over whatever ridiculously shaped beard my shaving mirror permits.

If no foul balls come my way, maybe I can keep from spilling my rum and Coke Zero on my new linen shirt.

Merry Christmas, y’all.

Feliz Navidad, even.