#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 preteen/teenage-children’s novels by Bill Myers, whose stories all had a faint undertone of Christianity themes, but in the case of the semi-popular Wally McDoogle series (which my local library had kept very well-stocked), those were completely overshadowed by how manically insane the stories were.
Specifically, Wally McDoogle was a physical klutz of no human compare. Most novels would feature at least three full-blown scenes of Wally causing some kind of industrial-scale accident by virtue of his escalating physical clumsiness—as relayed by whole caps-lock-filled pages of human screams and other unnatural noises. And, somehow, between all 150 or so pages of craziness, a genuine heart-filled moral emerges and reliably plants a warm, fuzzy feeling as the reader closes the book.
They weren’t the finest of children’s literature, but for me, at age where I really didn’t like to read, those paper-bound of Wally’s travails—seventeen of them in total—meant something special.
A week before Christmas, I read the on-theme My Life as Reindeer Road Kill (yes, all the titles follow the same structure). The book starts with Wally having a dream where an angel arrives to give him soem good deed quest. But his good-hearted attempts to attain the perfect gifts for him friends and family and elevate the Christmas spirit lead to what he objectively states are “the three worst traffic jams his town has ever seen” (in a three-day span). But in the end, the angel reappears in his dream telling him succeeded, pointing to several smaller good deeds he’d done in between that “came from the heart”. A touching ending, but the most physically lasting part of it for me was right at the end, when he agrees to sneak down with his younger sister before dawn on Christmas morning to open their presents under the Christmas tree early (which also came from the heart, of course).
Well, something about reading that made me think, “Why hasn’t my family ever done proper Christmas under the Christmas tree?” (Five years ago, as a special occasion when we’d just moved into our house in Ottawa, I did get like ten presents under the three—but it was just me. And since then, while my parents would typically buy me something I wanted vaguely around Christmas-time, we eschewed any formal gift-giving.) 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, it makes me cringe. Going to the mall with my dad to buy my mom (slippers) and brother (I don’t remember) a present without them knowing, like it was a big deal. Then doing the same with me mom. Awk-ward. But at the time, I seemed to enjoy it; on Christmas Eve, with the presents gathered under the tree, my excitement had reached serious sleep-disrupting levels.
Naturally, I wake at four in the morning on Christmas Day and can’t get back to sleep—presents are just a few hours away. So, to take my mind off it, I grab the other Wally McDoogle book I got from the library, My Life as Bigfoot Breath Mint—and read it. This one is about Wally visiting his super-cool uncle in Hollywood, but his lame-ass dad (whose lameness is especially emphasized throughout this story) who saves his life and saves the day at the very end during a failed whirlpool stunt, when the uncle ditches them to settle some unpaid gambling debts. It’s even better than Reindeer Road Kill, the best of all seventeen perhaps, and I finish it in my bed in one surreal, half-conscious sitting.
Shortly after I’m done that, my parents get up, and it’s finally true Christmas time. All I recall is that it was a very satisfying, happiness-filled affair, with any of the legit awkwardness that definitely characterized it not apparent to be at the time. Besides the Clue board game.1, I don’t even remember what presents I got.
But no, this story isn’t about the presents. But about a fictional thirteen-year-old boy with a big heart and non-existent hand-eye coordination skills showing me the true meaning of Christmas.