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.

Posted by Matt. E-mail me!