I’ve been consulting my charms, tea leaves, and telescopes pointed at trans-dimensional worm holes to bring you the very best, and accurate, predictions for 2009. I hope you’re sitting down for this.             

• Radiohead and NIN will each release new albums where they ask what they should pay you to download them. It will stir discussion and controversy throughout the music world, and millions will hail it as a brilliant business model we all should adopt.
• The marriage between Merb and Rails is a success and they give birth to the most powerful web development framework in the world. It then becomes sentient on August 29th and attempts to exterminate all of humanity. But only after it hijacks our Facebook and Twitter accounts and sends out millions of porn links to our mothers.
• At the peak of the aforementioned machine uprising, Microsoft posthumously comes to the rescue. All devices running their software just stop working sometime between 12 midnight and 2 am.
• The writers for Lost die in a tragic accident and take the secrets to the Island with them. Millions morn as they realize they will never know the meaning of the four toed statue. Or Jeremy Bentham. Or 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.
• Dwight and Angela get back together.
• Everyone everywhere suddenly sprouts wisdom and patience when dealing with email forwards and other circumstantial online information. Snopes.com then goes out of business.
• The real reason Bernie Madoff’s scheme delivers a pummeling blow to our economy?
  Kevin Bacon.
• Outgoing President George W. Bush realizes that he can use his newfound free time to coach dodgeball to endangered youths.
• President Elect Barak Obama will let hundreds of millions down as they realize he puts his pants on one leg at a time.

Yep, we got nothing for Ian, our first born, for Christmas ‘08. Nada. Zilch. And we’re not bad parents.

Colleen and I chatted at length about this.  It’s kinda like buying for the guy who has everything. What do you get a 1.2 year old for Christmas? He’ll barely remember it. He’ll definitely break or lose whatever stuff we give him. He can’t read. What does he really want?

We’ve observed that usually, gifts given to newborns and young babies are mostly for the parents/caretakers. We want the kid to look nice, so we buy clothes we think look nice. We want to have pictures of the baby having fun, so we buy stuff we think looks like fun for the photoshoot.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s gotta be fun for the parents, too. But that was partly what drove us to be so allegedly “grinchy” this year. What does he really want?

Crinkly wrapping paper. Mommy. Daddy. Tickles. So that’s what we did.

Just so you don’t think we lavished ourselves with expensive consumer goodies while our son starved in his crib, we were low key all around.  Colleen and I exchanged a couple books we each wanted to read. She bought be a case of Christmas Ale (thank’s Great Lakes!). And Colleen got a new swim outfit. Our cheapest Christmas yet.

What about Ian? Oh, he had a blast diving into the pile of wrappings and tissue. And he had fun helping us pile them up in our recycling bag. And then we sat and rolled a ball back and forth for a good hour before moving on to other fun (like falling face first into a pillow).

Fun photos and a great time. Our first, non-infant Christmas with our son. We didn’t buy him anything. And I wouldn’t have traded that for the world.