On Christmas morning, I tried to keep everything as normal as possible.

We get up, open presents and enjoy our annual treat of mini powdered donuts. But, at some point, I may have wanted to sneak off to each room in the house to see if I missed a special present.

My wife would never keep a present from me. But, as she knows all too well, I carry many scars from my younger days. One Christmas, my family tried to hide an awesome present from me.

They actually didn’t try and hide it. I just like to make things more dramatic than they seem sometimes. But I did go a large portion of Christmas Day one year without knowing that Santa had brought all of us a new air hockey table. I’m sure someone told me that Santa had a pretty nice surprise, but I prefer to think they hid the thing from me.

I must have been 10 or so because I remember that most, if not all, my siblings were there that morning. The lower floor of our house was clearly split into the part with carpet and the part with a tile floor. That year, my pile of presents sat pretty far away from the door to the tile part of our basement.

Unknown to me, my brothers spent a good part of that Christmas morning in the tiled area playing air hockey. Well, I’m sure they did. I don’t really know because I never really heard the game from where I sat.

I had plenty of other things to occupy me that day, but those seemed completely inconsequential once I found out we had an air hockey table in the back room. At some point, I looked up and asked where everyone was. Someone told me they were all playing air hockey. This totally changed the day.

True to form, however, I remember a lot more about sitting in the family room wondering where everyone was than I do about playing air hockey later in the day. Sometimes, I hate that I focus on that part of the experience.

Even though I try and turn the air hockey table story into some tale of woe, I know that it represented a big part of why I love Christmas. That marked the first of many days we spent playing the game. I have had pretty good fortune in my life so if missing out on a few hours of air hockey represents a tragedy – a wholly manufactured tragedy – than I can’t really complain.

I have no expectations of an air hockey table turning up at our house or anywhere else I go this holiday season, but I still have this compulsion to go check other parts of the party to see if one present escaped my view.  I learned my lesson on that pretty awesome Christmas when we all got a new game to play.

After all, it beats the time I got sick all over my presents one Christmas morning. I believe Matchbox City took the brunt of it. Or maybe it was Matchbox Country.

Either way, that’s a Christmas memory I don’t think I can turn into a positive.