Dave Barry - Bad Habits

Well, the holiday gift-giving season is upon us once again, like an outbreak of shingles. Already I have received dozens of colorful mail-order-gift catalogs urging me to buy bizarre objects and give them to people. I recently got a catalog featuring enormous cans of popcorn smeared with caramel, each containing enough carbohydrates to meet the needs of a medium-sized industrial city for a year. If you want to give this gift, you just call the catalog people on their toll-free number and they ship a can to the person of your choice. It never even has to enter your home.

The question, of course, is, Why would you give such a gift? Do you know of anybody in the entire United States who would actually want a huge congealed mass of caramel popcorn? Of course not. This is an example of a holiday gift, which is an object whose primary purpose is to be given, not to actually be used. It expresses the ultimate holiday gift-giving message, which is, “Look! I got you a gift!” Another example is electric razors. Every year at this time, you see television commercials wherein a cartoon version of an electric razor shaves a cartoon face just as well as a cartoon razor blade, and thousands of women go out and buy $39.95 electric razors and give them to men (“Look!

I got you a gift!”). And the men say, “Great! An electric razor!” Then they continue to use their nineteen-cent blade razors. They stick the electric razors into closets with their caramel-covered popcorn.

Men do the same thing to women. Every year I go to the department-store cosmetics counter, which emits a powerful aroma, reminiscent of a house of ill repute, and buy my wife one of the thirty thousand gift packages containing little designer tubes and jars with names like “Essence of Fragrance Moisturizing Body Cream,” “Body of Essence Cream Moisturizing Fragrance,” “Moist Fragrant Body Essential Creamer,” etc. I don’t know what these terms mean, and I don’t care. All I know is I can say, “Look! I got you a gift!” I doubt my wife uses these things, because she lets my two-year-old son play with them, which means he routinely smells like a house of ill repute, but that’s better than some of the things he smells like, if you get my drift.

But these are not the ultimate Holiday Gifts, because technically you could actually use them. I mean, you could use caramel-covered popcorn as attic insulation, and you could use an electric razor to crush insects. But many of the gifts that spring up in the holiday season reach a new level, the level of Pure Holiday Gift, which means you can’t use them for anything except possibly ballast. For example:

Cute ceramic knick-knack figurines depicting animals, especially cats—The way I see it, everybody who wants a cute ceramic cat has already bought one. It is cruel to inflict such objects on other people.

I once was present when a holiday guest gave the hostess a ceramic cat, and she stood there, handling it as you would a live grenade, and trying desperately to think of an excuse not to put it on her mantel, which is the only thing you can do with a knickknack. Eventually, of course, she had to put it on the mantel, and the entire room suddenly acquired an air of cuteness that no amount of expert interior decoration can disguise.

Guest soap formed into little balls or fruit—Nobody uses this soap. The people who live in the house don’t use it, because it’s for guests. The guests are afraid to use it, because they don’t want to mess it up. They end up not washing their hands, which leads to the spread of infections. The government should put a stop to this soon, because it is only a matter of time before somebody starts selling guest soap shaped like cats.

Fruitcakes manufactured in April and packaged in cans and allowed to sit in a warehouse until they reach the density of a bowling ball—These present all the problems of caramel-covered popcorn, with the added problem that they can cause hernias.

Coffee-table books—These are gigantic books with lots of pictures and titles like Scissors Through the Ages that you couldn’t read even if you wanted to because the pages are all welded together from when your guests spilled banana daiquiris on them.

What can you do about this? You can buy gifts that people actually use. Think how happy you’d be if YOU got, say, a case of paper towels. Wouldn’t that be terrific? That’s what I’m going to get my wife this year. I’ll bet she’ll be speechless.

I got to thinking about ecology the other day when I ran over a turtle with my lawnmower. Now before you reptile lovers start sending me irate letters full of misspelled words, let me assure you that I was not aiming for the turtle. I have enough trouble keeping my lawnmower in operation, and the last thing I would do is risk damaging it with a turtle. Let me also assure you that the turtle was unharmed, except for

a few nicks on its shell that might make it less attractive to turtles of the opposite sex, whichever sex that happens to be. I don’t know how you determine the sex of a turtle, and I don’t want to know. I have come to think of this particular turtle as male, because my two-year-old son, who receives signals directly from outer space! recently announced that its name is Bob.

Bob has been hanging around our lawn for several months now, despite our efforts to encourage him to go into the woods with the other turtles.

“These are the best years of your life, Bob,” we say. “Don’t waste them on our lawn.” But Bob turns a deaf ear to our suggestions, assuming turtles have ears. You would think the lawnmower incident would have made him have second thoughts about our lawn, but lately he seems more attached to it than ever. This makes me think that maybe the theory of evolution is wrong after all. I figure that if turtles really had been evolving for all these years, they would have come up with something more intelligent than Bob.

Anyway, all this got me to thinking about ecology. Most wild animals are, like Bob, fairly stupid. Plants are even worse. It is up to us human beings to use our superior brains to protect them, or one day we will wake up to find there is no more nature, and we will no longer have any place to hold 1960s-style outdoor weddings.

So I am all for preserving wildlife, but I also think we have to use some judgment about it. We can’t go around preserving all wildlife, because some of it is disgusting. Take insects, for example. The other night, while we were having dinner, some wildlife entered our house in the form of a flying insect that looked like a mosquito, but was large enough to play in the National Football League. It was the kind of insect that wouldn’t even have to sting you, because it could crush you to death merely by landing on you.

Now I imagine that the president of the Sierra Club, sitting in the safety of his insect-free office, would say that we should have let this insect drone around the dining room until it broke a window and flew outside, where it would be eaten by another species, which would in turn be eaten by another species, and so on and so on, leading up the Great Chain of Life, until finally the second-to-last link in the chain is eaten by a nuclear physicist. But that is mere theory. The truth is that nothing around my house would have dared to eat this insect; in fact, it probably would have eaten Bob, shell and all. I bet that if the president of the Sierra Club had been in my house, he would have done exactly what I did, which was to leap up from the table and batter the insect repeatedly with a rolled-up newspaper.

So I propose that we direct our ecology efforts toward preserving those forms of wildlife that are safe and nondisgusting, namely: