Another Christmas is kaput, and I’ve barely recovered. It was the first time in years that I’d finished the Advent Calendar before Christmas Eve, and boy, I didn’t waste it. It’s probably lame to correlate a carefree Christmas with a three day bender, but that’s just what Dr. Claus ordered.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I saw (and mostly loved) Avatar, introduced my nephews to the perils of The Ewok Adventure, and endured that sad stroke of midnight when all of my beloved all-Christmas radio stations switched back to their normal terrible playlists.

Of course, you and I are freaks, and no matter how old we get, the success of any Christmas will always depend on the loot it brings. So begins X-E’s 2009 Christmas Fallout Thread, where I compare gifts with you, and you compare gifts with me, and they compare gifts with them, and we all make each other jealous, and blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah. It’s our one chance a year to be unabashedly materialistic, giddy over nothing, and guiltlessly greedy.

You know what to do. In the comments, tell the world what you got this Christmas. (Or Hanukah, or whatever it is you that all of you who aren’t Catholics in the tri-state area celebrate.) You can make it as simple as a list, or go into detail about each present. The world is your oyster.

Hard to believe, but this is actually our seventh annual Christmas Fallout Thread. See the previous editions with this handy series of links:

Now, HERE’S MAH TREASURE.

Note: I’ll be updating this throughout the day, because as it turns out, writing about stuff people gave me is pretty exhausting. This first batch is roughly half of this year’s loot.

• The Blowfish Lamp!

There’s this Polynesian restaurant in my city that’s been around since before any of us were born, and hasn’t changed much since its grand opening. It’s tacky, it’s filled with random Tiki crap, and I love it. Whenever the brunt of my geographically-spread family ends up back here, we have to go to this restaurant.

For years, I’ve been eyeing these light-up hanging blowfish they have there. I’ve even asked staffers if I could buy one of them, but they never bit. (Actually, they wouldn’t even answer — I’d always get the quick “ho ho you crazy” wave-off before they scurried off to the kitchen.)

Well, up above is one of those light-up hanging blowfish. My brother found them for sale online, and though I didn’t ask what he paid, it’s clear that no amount was too much for a dead, preserved blowfish with a light bulb inside. It’s now a permanent fixture of our living room, and will continue to be until my death in 2014.

I didn’t want a lot of decorations/novelties/toys this year, because we honestly don’t have room for them. My office looks like a shaken snowglobe, assuming that we could replace all of the white specks with twenty-year-old cereal boxes and Stretch Screamers dolls. I mainly wanted books, and I got a lot of them. Enough to build a fort out of books. For a cat. A very small cat. [more]

Well, it’s Christmas Eve! Officially! Plooky plockily! I still need to buy a few presents, I still need to shave for the first time since 1937, and I still need to stuff 50 mushrooms with breadcrumbs, garlic, oil and my top secret ingredient. I am not ready. But, I have lots of wine. And sake. And eggnog.

Thanks for spending another holiday season with X-E! The 2009 Advent Calendar is complete! This year’s was a soul-sucking sacrifice to get done, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I’m glad that when I’m seeing stars from the wine/sake/eggnog twelve hours from now, I’ll be able to think of those stupid little characters having a merry Christmas instead of being eaten by crabs. Ironically, we’ll have just finished eating crabs ourselves by then. Their legs, anyway.

Full disclosure: Really wish I would’ve had time to post more “normal” holiday stuff this season — that’s my one regret. Well, that and the fact that we were too busy and frantic to even get a Christmas Tree. And that I didn’t use the foot of snow we got to build an ice fort. Yay, wine. I had to focus on the AC, because once that thing gets away from me, there’s no catching up. Hopefully we can do some more “standard” celebrating between now and New Year’s?

Your support is so appreciated — thanks again for making this dinosaur of a site still worth mashing my hands on an ash-encrusted keyboard for after all these many years. Have a great holiday, and please use the comments to talk about your own Christmas celebrations — the parties, the people, the traditions, and all of that shiny new plastic.

I’ve gotta go find a razor, scotch tape, and a department store that’s still open. Below: Random happy pictures.

I’ll see ya for the Fallout Thread — have a good one!

Well, the Advent Calendar has kept me too busy to really write much else, so to the more than half of you who don’t read it: Haha, you’re fucked.

We got a lot of snow today, which is nice, because this has been one whirlwind of a holiday season that I’ve barely had a chance to smell, eat, digest or otherwise own.

Christmas is less than a week away, which seems both impossible and absolutely insane. I’m not done shopping. I’m not even done decorating. Thank Leviathan for that “Christmas Lite” week between the 25th and New Year’s. (Seriously, let’s all plan to make that week the most festive, relaxing post-season in history — it’s a mandatory rule for all of you.)

Back to the snow: The photo above (actually a screengrab from a low-rent Quicktime) gives almost no impression of the vast sea of white seen from our front window, but trust me, it’s killer. We must be up to six inches (not that bullshit “six inches where snow collects at its highest” thing, either — a legit six inches), and if the reports are to be believed, there will be over a foot of God’s dandruff waiting for me to shovel by tomorrow morning.

It’s gotta be the biggest snowstorm we’ve had in years. It’s completely white out there, but also dead silent. No cars, no stupid kids, no pissing strays…just totally empty and silent, and I love it like that. It totally removes any sense that I should be doing more with my weekend than taking pictures of crab taxidermy and homosexual rabbit figures, or conversely, blabbing about Zhu Zhu Pets.

I’m sure you’ve heard about these Zhu Zhu Pets. They’re this year’s biggest “fad toy,” reminiscent both in popularity and gimmick to the Furby of old. Kids are absolutely wild for these, and thus, they’re impossible to find. I purchased mine from a third party seller on Amazon for $35, not even realizing that they actually retail for just eight bucks.

And if that 400% markup (the cheapest I could find) doesn’t mess with your head, consider this: The random Zhu Zhu Pets vehicles and accessories (which are all but essential to have any real fun with the things) are even harder to find, with stuff that costs $10 in stores selling for up to and over $100 online.

As the story gets told from one person to another person to another person to a cat and back to another person, Zhu Zhu Pets have garnered a reputation that they might not deserve. They’re cute, fun and interesting, but they’re not loaded with insane levels of artificial intelligence. At root, they’re just battery-powered hamster dolls that roll around the floor and chirp. (Which isn’t to say that they aren’t capable of wonders beyond that, but don’t be fooled into thinking that your Zhu Zhu Pet will fetch the newspaper and help out with the crossword puzzle afterwards.)

I made a tiny movie of the miracle rodent, though after uploading it, I noticed that YouTube has no less than 700,000 other Zhu Zhu Pets videos available, which all tell the tale more thoroughly than mine. While I haven’t really engrossed myself in all that this wondrous little rat can do, I’ve seen enough to say this much with confidence: If I was a kid, I would go absolutely apeshit until somebody gave me one.

It isn’t so much what Zhu Zhu Pets do that make them so appealing. It’s the idea that you’re getting a “real” pet. Think of all the similar fads that existed for the same reason, from Tamagotchis to Furbys and beyond. Sure, they were interesting toys with some progressive ideas and technologies at play, but at heart, it was the “pet concept” that really sold ‘em. Same thing here. What kid wouldn’t want to spend Christmas morning convincing themselves that they got a new hamster to take care of, even if that hamster was filled with wires and plastic instead of bones and blood?

Thumbs up. Factor in all of the weird vehicles and “hamster habitats” that you can buy for your robot rats, and the Zhu Zhu line seems well worth the hype. Mainly, I just find the idea of electronic hamsters sold in perfectly rectangular window boxes too adorable not to commend.

Finally, there’s a new line of “Chocolate Edition” spins on your favorite board games, including the one I chose to spend ten bucks on during my last lapse of judgement at Target: Chocolate Scrabble.

Many popular board games have been remodeled like this, and while I can’t honestly claim that they’re intended to be “Christmas editions,” the fact that Target put them in their stocking stuffer section makes it hard to deny, because Target is never wrong. Besides, I don’t know how your family does their Christmas party, but we always have random, wacky shit like this at ours. A chocolate Scrabble set would fit right in.

Instead of literally translating the original games into chocolate form, they’ve scaled down the rules and decreased the number of usual pieces. On the bright side, the pieces you do get are much larger, and they’re filled with chocolate!

Though you can’t really tell from my photo, the game board is actually a poster-sized sheet of paper. The wrapped chocolate letters are about as large as After Eight mints, and the winner of this delicious game gets to take home that gold medallion shown on the upper left. (Which, of course, is also filled with chocolate.)

I could totally see breaking this baby out after my family’s Christmas Eve dinner, when we’re all too loaded to really care if we’re playing properly, or even if certain players cheat by eating undesirable letters. Somehow, the thought of that just injected a much needed dose of Christmas spirit right up my spinal cord. Chocolate Scrabble, you’re an alien Santa Claus.

It’s way too late at night to classify this as an SNT, so, uh, Merry Sunday?

It was supposed to be so innocent — a simple evening run to Toys “R” Us for batteries and a few other needed bits. The place was expectedly mobbed, but I managed to sneak in and out without a long wait, as the second I got on line, a bunch of registers opened up and speeded everything along. Most of the stuff that I needed was on sale, too. It was shaping up to be the most perfect little TRU run in holiday history, until my car exploded on the way home.

Actually, it was just a flat tire. A flat tire may be a minor nuisance for the planet at large, but it isn’t for me. I can’t change tires, and even if I could, my old donut tire wasn’t even in the car. To further the drama, I’d left my cell phone at home.

Struggling to find the button to put on my hazard lights for the first time ever, I sat on the side of the road, waiting for a cop to come rescue me — just like in the movies. Twenty minutes and a chewed tongue later, and I was still sitting there. Ultimately, I drove the thing home with a flat, clunking the whole way, assuredly twisting my front-right rim into a pretzel and increasing the cost of tomorrow’s repair job tenfold.

That’s the long way of saying: Today’s AC entry will be up a bit late.

Tonight’s SNT is brought to you by G&E’s Color-Changing LED Night Light, snowman-themed. I love this thing. The crude animated GIF really doesn’t sell the smoothness of the color-changing feature, where reds subtly morph to blues, and blues subtly morph to whites, and yadda yadda. Most electrical outlets have to spend the holiday season uglied by a dozen extension cords, but with this, your outlet becomes a decoration in itself.

Getting back to Toys “R” Us for a moment: It wasn’t easy to navigate the store’s aisles with so many stressed out shoppers present, but because Matt is dead and I’m actually a sentient mutant ferret who took his place years ago, I managed. Somewhere in those zips and dashes, I found Christmas magic…

This LEGO Holiday Magnet was a nice surprise, and not just because it’s a tribute to the LEGO Santa who died on December 21st, 2007. It was also a nice surprise for at least, oh, thirty other reasons.

The lower base is the only truly magnet-related artifact in the set, and if it would’ve fit as nicely on the package, this would be more correctly titled a “LEGO Miniature Christmas Playset.” You get Santa, a bare tree, a lantern, and what appears to be a toolbox filled with random, orphaned LEGO parts. Mainly I’m just happy that there’s something more interesting on our fridge to look at than pictures of my distant cousins’ kids now.

While there, I also picked up this small, musical Bumble snowglobe. I love Bumble, and I’ve failed at every opportunity to see something Bumble-related and not buy it.

A little button on the front activates the globe, sending the styrofoam snowballs spinning like mad while various, Rudolph-related songs blast at a surprisingly high volume. I gave the globe a test run at TRU, and was surprised to learn that it will play music for approximately 17 minutes even if you only press the button once. Not knowing how to turn it off at the time, I was forced to shop with my own personal musical score following me around.

In our collective travels with small, styrofoam snowballs, we’ve all learned that they’re extremely static and adhesive. Hence, as they fly around Bumble’s spherical abode, they have a nasty habit of getting stuck to his head. Maybe the snowglobe’s makers made it this way to distract us from the unfathomable “BUMBLES” label above the activation button. Why did they pluralize? Clearly there is only one Bumble in this globe.

Off to work on the AC. If I’m lucky, red wine by 3 AM. Happy SNT!

Marred by an unexpectedly busy work schedule and the yearly epic struggle to make my Advent Calendar deadlines, I haven’t been doing nearly enough “normal blogs.” This has to change, because Christmas is a time for sentences and paragraphs.

I hope you’re all having a terrific season so far. Mine has been interesting in a completely boring way. December has been so busy that it’s barely had a chance to register as “Christmas month,” and yet, there are so many little things constantly happening to set it apart from any other time of year. The radio tunes, obviously. The multicolored glow of old lights, strung hastily around our front windows. The seven foot audio-animatronic Jason Voorhees in a Santa hat.

I suppose that would be Reason #1224 why Christmastime is awesome. Even if your impossible goal is to spend the entire month waist deep in nothing but cocoa and holiday movies, being faced with the usual sucky grind somehow seems…less sucky.

And of course, there’s always the chance for the errant oddball adventure, like when I drove halfway across the city at 1 AM last night to get a Hess Truck.

Yeah, no joke. I am such a wild and crazy lunatic, free of the shackles of mindless conformity. Or maybe it’s not such a big deal to drive to gas stations for toys at 1 AM, I dunno.

Anyway, so I get there, and it’s one of those Hess stations with an attached mini-mart. While advertised as a 24-hour store, the truth is that — after a certain hour — they lock the place down and force customers to place orders through a small window on the front wall. And when I say “window,” it’s actually more like the pull-down hatch on a streetside post box.

So it’s 26 degrees outside, windy as all fuck, and here I am, standing outside a Hess station, asking for toy trucks through a hole in the wall. Through the glass, the Hess staffer looked at me much in the same way a person would look at the mythological Lernaean Hydra, finally fetching my Hess truck after moments of stunned silence.

In summary: I got this year’s Hess Truck.

Only, it’s not exactly a “truck.” Actually, it isn’t a truck at all, but rather a race car with a baby race car inside it. More on that in a minute.

If you’re having trouble discerning why you’re reading about gas stations and toy cars during X-E’s Christmas Spectacular, you have been living under the legendary, proverbial rock. For decades, Hess has annually released a new toy truck (or some other vehicle) during the holiday season, complete with catchy, jingly television ads.

By keeping this tradition going since 1964, Hess has managed to turn a gas station-branded line of vehicle toys into a tried and true Christmas classic. This is likely the most amazing feat in known history.

I was never huge on toy cars as a kid. I was always more of an action figure guy. I liked toys with heads. Still, Hess Trucks managed to wiggle their way onto most of my yearly wishlists, simply because they felt so wholesome and Christmassy. (I’ve been lame like that even since childhood.) Honestly, I think I took it as the closest I’d ever get to Ralphie’s kid brother’s “zeppelin moment” at the end of A Christmas Story. Red Ryder be damned, I wanted that fucking blimp.

Over the years, these Hess vehicles have just gotten stranger and stranger. We’ve had old failthfuls like fire trucks and whatnot, but we’ve also seen everything from Hess monster trucks to Hess space shuttles. This year’s edition seems positively benign compared to Hess’s esoteric past, but your opinion may change after seeing its special secret.

The main attraction is shown above — a good-sized, sleek, shiny race car with all sorts of blinking lights and sounds. The lights have been tucked into every possible orifice of the car. It’d look really great under a Christmas tree, because of all the lies that holiday movies and TV specials have told me, the one that stings most is that people actually leave battery-operated toys turned on under the tree. This fabrication seriously needs to become a reality.

As for the sounds, they’re all button-activated, and run the usual gamut of horns and bleeps and vrooms. Nothing too odd. No ostrich howls.

The hood pops open to reveal another, smaller race car, with additional working lights and a pull-back-and-let-roll action feature. I think all toy cars should come with other toy cars inside them. I’m totally getting a Prime/Roller vibe from this duo. I wonder if the big car cries when the little car wanders off and gets into trouble. I hope so.

As usual, the quality of this year’s Hess “truck” is superb. It’s as good or better as any similar toy car on the market, though you may be hard-pressed to find another race car with a smaller race car inside to compare it to. I can’t remember how much Hess charged me for it, because the whole experience of buying it at 1 AM has become a blur of exhaustion, freezing cowind and shame.

Holy sweet mother of Mary…Santa swinging the checkered racing flag at the end of that commercial is the most mindblowingly insanely awesome thing I have EVER seen. I haven’t rewound-and-rewatched one second of video that many times in a row since seeing Lynn Peltzer’s crazy expression after the Gremlins suddenly turned on Johnny Mathis’s Christmas LP.

Oh, the commercial names the price. 24.99. Now you know.

I’ve posted nearly a billion pictures since starting X-Entertainment, and during that time, I’ve experimented with many different backgrounds. So, mental note: Never use shiny, reflective wrapping paper as a photo background ever again.

Unsightly glare aside, I’m pleased to announce the revival of a modern Christmas classic: All-new holiday edition Cheetos! I’ve been waiting for Chester to give into his festive yearnings ever since those tongue-dyeing bastards of 2005, and while these Cheetos won’t turn your mouth radioactive colors, they’re suitably Santaish.

Marked as a “limited winter edition,” these White Cheddar Snowballs resist any kind of denominational affiliation, instead opting for a central theme safe for those of any and every religion: Snow!

The bag didn’t lie. The Cheetos are humongous. You’ll be torn between eating them and using them to drop fifty-cent sideshow hecklers into water tanks.

They’re also a bit yellow, which isn’t an ideal hue for a snack based on snow. Taste-wise, they’re less like white cheddar Cheetos and more like stale regular Cheetos, but this is forgivable, as Cheetos is one of the few foods that’s arguably better when stale.

Getting back to the size, it’s really something, and I’m not sure if adding a nickel to the photo was enough to convey their enormity. I’ve never been more certain that I could kill another man with an armament consisting of nothing but Cheetos.

It took some serious creativity on Frito-Lay’s part to figure out how to market giant, yellow, roughly-spherical Cheetos as a holiday edition. Even if it’s a stretch, you have to appreciate the effort.