Saturday, November 18, 2006

Let the present-ing begin

I have already discussed this year's round of sibling Christmas gifts with most of you, individually, and the recurring concern that I heard from all of you could be summed up as, "may the most gifts go to the most gifted!" Although I have my own private reservations about this greed-oriented twist on Christmas, I will concede if this is what everyone wants.

The question that is on everyone's mind, I am sure, cuts straight to the heart of the matter: "Tell me, David, who is the most gifted? I need to know in order to allocate, from at least several paychecks, the necessary funds." As time is running short (only 37 more days to go until Christmas, by my reckoning; only 37 more days and a week to go, by mom's reckoning), I feel that the time is ripe for me to resolve this matter. Determining the giftedness of myself and my siblings is a difficult task - difficult in terms of impartiality and difficult in terms of Daniel - so I have chosen what seems to me to be an objective and fitting measure. The results, in magnitude of giftedness:

David (20)
Janel (19)
Rachel (10)
Daniel (8)
Steve (6)
Ben (5)
Lisa (3)
Andy (1)

I trust that most everyone can accept my judgment. For those of you who are harder to satisfy (I'm thinking of the bottom three, here), always raising objections and challenging every inconvenience, I realize that I will likely need to substantiate those figures. Very simply, they are tallies of how many posts each sibling has made to Barnhart Central, to date. I realize that the margins were razor-thin in places. Between Ben and Steve, for instance, I confess that calling Steve more gifted than Ben is not only highly dubious, but that the difference may ultimately be based upon polling discrepancies. In another close race, Janell and I would have been tied had I not had the judiciousness to compute this very post in my tally, mercifully sparing the family from a protracted runoff.

The above numbers do not necessarily need to translate into number of gifts, although I would not object to such a system. In fact, I highly doubt anyone would object to that idea, as even a low-scorer such as Ben would be receiving 5 times the amount of sibling presents than he did last year. The only real loser is Andy, but last time I witnessed his garage, it appears that he has already taken the liberty of gifting himself all year long. Perhaps the yule-tide season will stir charitable feelings in Daniel's heart, and Andy will receive some miscellaneous Star Wars bric-brac.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm...a response to this reqires some serious consideration. I would have you to know, though, that I did the bulk of my Christmas shopping months ago, Mr. David! Which is not to say I still won't be late, but I do deserve some "brownie points!"

Anonymous said...

whoever commented up there is not mom and obviously an imposter. someone should look into blocking them from the website

Anonymous said...

and janell should get another gift point because you spelled her name wrong

Steve Barnhart said...

No Lisa, that's the phonetic spelling. Jaa-nel.

Anonymous said...

What do you mean, I'm not me! You don't think I could have done some Christmas shopping prior to now? It was not traditional, I'll grant you, but I did it, all the same. I'm feeling kind of picked on. Drat, that old track record of mine! I mean well, anyway. We'll see how well you do when you've got six kiddies running around:)