Dec. 20: Shteevie's missed mistletoe opportunities

 Now and then, I think about the machine in the mall.

It was the summer of 1991 and I was working at a T-shirt store the year I graduated high school. Outside the store was a machine, no bigger than the monitor of a desktop computer, that would tell you what you should look for in a mate. How it worked was you put in a quarter and then the computer listed a whole bunch of traits and asked you to pick the one that was most important. If memory serves, those traits were as follows:

- Good looking

- Sexy

- Romantic

- Intelligent

- Healthy

- Wealthy

- Compassionate.

After you chose the trait that was most important, you picked the trait that was least important. 18-year-old me said that "good looking" was most important. Least important was "wealthy."

The computer told me that I was a shallow and immature person who only wanted a nice piece of arm candy to impress his friends. "Pretty accurate," I thought.

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That was my mindset throughout high school. I wanted a girlfriend - was desperate for a girlfriend - but for all the wrong reasons. In theory, girlfriends are supposed to complement you. They are not meant to be sports cars, they are meant to ride next to you in the sports car. But I didn't know this at the time. So when I did get a girlfriend in high school, it didn't last long. She grew frustrated with me very quickly because she sensed that I was using her to replenish my self-esteem, not to go riding around in sports cars.

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The high school girlfriend and I started dating in mid-September. By mid-October she hated me. This destroyed my dream of having a girlfriend over Christmas. I wanted to do a gift exchange with her and maybe kiss under the mistletoe. Alas, the high school girlfriend was in Montreal for the holidays and I was stuck in cold Calgary.

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I had to wait a long time before I had a girlfriend for Christmas. I think I was 27 when it first happened. By that time, I would have picked different traits on that hoary old machine in the mall.  

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From a book of children's Christmas jokes:

Q. What's worse than Athlete's Foot?

A. Mistletoe.

Ahahaha.

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The other day, Ash told me that she wasn't participating in one of her annual Christmas traditions, which is to binge watch Hallmark Christmas movies. A combination of COVID and work responsibilities spoiled it for her. So for 2022, she spent no time vicariously living in small towns where impoverished carpenters in green sweaters wooed career-driven city girls in red sweaters. 

I have only seen a couple of those movies. Guys like me have a maximum allotment of Hallmark Christmas movies we're allowed to watch before our guy status is revoked (the maximum is currently set at four per lifetime.) Mistletoe is a plot device in at least half of those movies. Usually the mistletoe is being held over the heads of the protagonist couple by one of the following:

- An adorable precocious kid with a missing tooth.

- The city girl in the red sweater's mother.

- Santa Claus.

- The kindly old librarian who wants to rekindle the magic of Christmas.

- Former Calgary Flame Hakan Loob.

Merry Christmas, Stanley Cup

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I remember a sprig of mistletoe hanging over our classroom door in Grade 7. I remember this because there was a girl named Jane who had a crush on a guy named Hakan. Jane was waiting for Hakan to walk through the door so she could kiss him. I walked through the door instead. She made a lunge, saw that it was me, and the look of anticipation on her face was instantly replaced with one of disgust. 

The teacher got rid of the mistletoe shortly after that. I don't see it in classrooms or offices or shopping malls or public gatherings of the Conrad Bain Fan Club. This does not surprise me. It's an invitation to a sexual harassment lawsuit.

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Besides starring in 20 per cent of Hallmark Christmas movie, Hakan Loob works as a European hockey scout for the Calgary Flames, who will likely win the Stanley Cup the year after I die. 

This note is really stupid and my mom hates it.