#163. A Wally McDoogle Christmas (Tuesday, December 25, 2001)
What was your best day…of enjoying something that seems extremely awkward in hindsight?
Let’s start with the obvious question. Who the hell is Wally McDoogle, and why was he granted ownership of my eleventh Christmas specifically?
Well, he is the protagonist of a series of children’s novels by Bill Myers, whose stories all had a faint Christian undertone. Wally was a physical klutz of almost inhuman proportions. Every book seemed to contain multiple industrial-scale disasters caused by his escalating clumsiness, usually relayed through entire caps-lock-filled pages of screams and other unnatural noises. Somehow, amid 150 pages of insanity, a sincere moral would emerge and leave me with a warm, fuzzy feeling at the end.
They weren’t the finest children’s literature, but at an age when I really didn’t like to read, those seventeen paperbacks meant something special to me.
A week before Christmas, I read the seasonally appropriate My Life as Reindeer Road Kill (yes, every title followed that structure). Wally spends the book trying disastrously to create the perfect Christmas for everyone around him, somehow causing “the three worst traffic jams his town has ever seen” in three days before eventually learning that the small good deeds mattered more. But the detail that stuck with me was at the very end, when he agrees to sneak downstairs with his little sister before dawn to open presents under the tree.
Well, something about reading that made me think: Why hasn’t my family ever done proper Christmas under the Christmas tree? (Five years earlier, when we’d just moved to Ottawa, I’d gotten about ten presents under the tree as a one-off in #89—but just for me. Since then, my parents might buy me something around Christmas, but we had no formal gift-giving ritual.) So I convince them that’s something we have to do. And we have to give each other presents this time.
This was completely counter to my personality, and thinking about it now makes me cringe: going to the mall with my dad to secretly buy presents for my mom (slippers) and brother (I don’t remember), then doing the same with my mom. Awk-ward.
But at the time, I loved it; by Christmas Eve, the presents under the tree had me too excited to sleep properly.
Naturally, I wake at four in the morning on Christmas Day and can’t get back to sleep. So, to take my mind off the presents a few hours away, I grab the other Wally McDoogle book from the library, My Life as Bigfoot Breath Mint, and read the whole thing in one surreal, half-conscious sitting. It’s even better than Reindeer Road Kill—possibly my favorite of all seventeen—and somehow ends with Wally’s supposedly lame dad saving his life during a failed Hollywood whirlpool stunt.
Shortly after that, my parents get up, and it’s finally proper Christmas time. All I remember is that it was a genuinely happy, satisfying affair, with none of the awkwardness I can see in hindsight registering with me at the time. Besides the Clue board game1, I don’t even remember what presents I got.
But this story isn’t really about the presents. It’s about a fictional thirteen-year-old boy with a big heart and nonexistent hand-eye coordination showing me the true meaning of Christmas.