With Christmas looming and shopping days dwindling one of the major stressors of the
year is building. You haven’t bought your Christmas presents yet. Even worse, the people
you have to buy for have already bought things for you. They are sitting under the tree
right now – taunting you. If only you knew what they bought you, then you could make
sure that your gift is equally thoughtful (or maybe even a few bucks more “thoughtful”).
Unwrapping the gifts isn’t an option because there’s no way you’ll be able to reassemble
the wrapping nearly enough. You are going to have to guess.
To aid in this process I have created a guide on estimating the contents of unopened
Christmas gifts based on the size of the box.
Big box! What could it be?
Is it heavy?
• Snow tires
• 4 dozen stolen library books
• Ground beef for a year
• A drum of crude oil
• A human corpse
Is it light?
• A stuffed walrus
• A helium balloon with a dirty word on it
• 12 cubic feet of puffed wheat
• A pair of earrings and a lot of crumpled up newspaper
• Schrödinger’s Cat (but is it alive?)
• Influenza H2N1
Medium sized box! What could it be?
Is it flat?
• A sweater
• A Christmas sweater
• An ugly Christmas sweater
• Well it could be something else… but it isn’t
Is it breadbox sized?
• A breadbox
• A blender
• A colony of fire ants
• A collection of prescription bottles half full of expired antipsychotics
Is it heavy?
• Dirt
• A box of hammers
• A loaf of blue cheese
• $50,000 in small unmarked bills
• Hundreds of pictures of you sleeping that were taken by someone standing outside
your bedroom window
Does it rattle when you shake it?
• Owl pellets
• A jar of toenails
• A live diamondback rattlesnake
• Several damaged bottles of nitro glycerine
Small box! What could it be?
Is it long and skinny?
• A box of Bic pens (stolen from work)
• A bracelet made from human teeth
• A swatch of Mao Tse-Tung’s armpit hair
• A smelt in a box!
Does it look like a ring box?
• The missing evidence in the JFK assassination case
• The keys to a 1987 Ford Fiesta
• African pickled Tsetse fly jam
• A preserved piece of used chewing gum
I sincerely hope this list helps you to divine the gift giving intentions of your loved ones
so that you can repay their gestures with an appropriate response.
