Christmas!

[superaielman]

What'd you get?

I got:

A wallet
A 2011 Scotland desk calendar
Candy
A Way of Kings giant ass bookmark
A Mistborn T-shirt
50 dollars in cash
A Packers floormat
A Packers car magnet
A guns and roses <i>appetite for destruction</i> T-shirt
A Packers hoodie and T-shirt
A 17th street surf shop Hoodie
Minutes for my cell phone



I'm happy. Yay.

[Xeroma]

Candy
$65 to spend on Steam
3 months XBL Gold subscription
Three new pairs of pants[black jeans, sweats, and beige flannel-innards cargo]
New socks
Leather gloves
A scarf
Ridiculously nice new jacket
A carrying bag
A blender
Universal component cable kit[mostly for my Wii and PS2]
A 3rd party wiimote[may trade it in for an official one...]
A blender

I think I did pretty good this year.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Loot!

Three ties
A very nice long-sleeved shirt
A suit (bought early December, but counts)
A fancy belt and brown socks
A new wallet (FUCK YES)

Additionally, I bought a new MP3 player and a new headset for Christmas.

Fun stuff.

[Fudozukushi]

money

[Hunter Sopko]

Games:
Eternal Sonata
NHL10
Demon's Souls
Star Ocean 4
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1&2
Mana Khemia 2 (Awesome condition with all extras)
Valkyria Chronicles 2
Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep
Pokemon Platinum
Wild Arms of Oz

DVDs
The Hangover
Hot Fuzz
Accepted
Tokyo Godfathers
Revenge of the Nerds
Galaxy Quest
Zoolander
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Chuck Seasons 1 and 2
Eureka Season 3.5
Simpsons Season 11

Iron Man 2 Blu-Ray
Fifth Element Blu-Ray
Scratchoff Tickets (Won 25 bucks this year!)
2 pairs of jeans
Jets t-shirt
Undearwear and socks
Bottle of wine (Tempranillo) plus an aerating pourer.
Candy
$20 Target giftcard

About $135 from relatives as well.

Also should be noted that this is the last year I'm getting this much stuff. I told them that after this year I'll be cutting down stuff dramatically, so I think thats why they went out of their way to get as much as they did. (Plus I shopped a bit with them and nearly half the games ended up being free/the DVDs were dirt cheap)

[Bardiche]

I got a hat.

Americans always have such large lists of gift-receiving. Must be a typical American thing, I've never seen anyone receive over $100 in gifts here.

[Xeroma]

It is pretty common in america, since xmas is treated as a bit of a big deal over here.

[Bardiche]

Yeah, I figured as much. Given you guys invented the gift-giving and everything it's honestly not that surprising, but it keeps boggling me how expensive everyone dishes out for Christmas. And how there are the typical threads to brag about your Christmas "haul" every year.

Sometimes, I feel a little envious. Of course, the only  I am actually envious of here is Snow right now. I need a new suit.

[Twilkitri]

New television & current Guinness World Records book (mother & stepfather), Mass Effect 1 (brother), chocolate (other relatives).

Television supports more than just PAL50 so now I can actually make sense of FMVs in certain NTSC games! Also has better-than-monaural sound capabilities. I am truly living in the future.

[SageAcrin]

money

[Nitori]

money and a stuffed tickle me Ko

[Shale]

I didn't get any direct presents, but the GF and I did a bunch of shopping for stuff we'll both use, so I figure that counts.

A Blu-ray player with wireless thingy
Toy Story 1-3
Mad Men seasons 1-3
Chuck seasons 2 & 3
Castle Season 2
The Wizard of Oz blu-ray
One camera each
A giant box of candy from her brother
And a smoked turkey that will be Christmas dinner.

[Lady Door]

A pair of real diamond earrings.

Small little studs, simple cut, but they're perfect - I've needed a nice pair of neutral earrings to wear. I have plenty of novelty earrings, but this - aside from my necklace - is the first piece of "grown up" jewelry I've gotten.

[Cotigo]

I got:

Beer
Money (Steam games)
Dragon Quest 9

I gave:
The Orange Box (to my friend who got me DQ9)
A probe thermometer (mother)
Beer (sister)
CD (father).

In recent years Christmas has been less about the whole gifting thing and more about getting wasted with the parents.  I am perfectly all right with this. >_>

[VySaika]

The Sleeping Beauty, by Mercedes Lackey (5th book in the 500 Kingdoms series)
Set of springform pans(largely for making cheesecake)
Good steel measuring cups and spoons
Resonance of Fate, PS3 version
Golden Sun DS
Memory Foam slippers(wasn't my present, but they didn't fit the person they were for, so she passed 'em to me)
Pandora One gift subscription
$50 gift card to a big & tall men's clothing store

All in all, quite content with this. As well as with the way dinner turned out. I have no idea what I did differently with the gravy this year, but it was absurdly good.

Also, things I gave:

Cookies(to a whole lot of people)
The Humble Indy Bundle thing(to Xer)
Okami and Megaman Zero collection(to my sister)
three pairs of fuzzy socks(to Jenna)

and then a whole mess of other things that Jenna put my name on but I actually had nothing to do with. <_<;

[Lance]

Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
Overlord: Dark Legend (Wii)
Grenadier (DVD)
The Emperor's New Groove (DVD)
Gift cards to WalMart and Best Buy
12-month calendar full of various drawings of mythological creatures
A quilt
Some salt and pepper shakers in the shape of Easter Island heads
New cutting board
Brita water filters
Betty Crocker cookbook
6-pack of Glade plug-ins
Assorted candy and foodstuffs

For those who don't remember, my cousin and I have a tradition going where we try to make each other's gifts as difficult to open as possible. Here's what I did to him this year.

Before
After

...mwahahaha.

Here's the story. About six years ago, I let him borrow my copy of Skies of Arcadia. Despite my repeated requests that he return it, he never did. So this year, I decided to just buy a copy for myself. I wrapped it up like you see above and gave it to him on Christmas Eve. Once he managed to unwrap it, I took it from him and told him that it was mine and he could just keep the copy that he's been borrowing from me for the past six years. Basically, I gave him his Christmas gift six years ago.

For his gift to me, he got his girlfriend to help him out. She took my gift (Overlord: Dark Legend) and sewed it shut in a small cloth bag using a sewing machine. Then she sealed off the seams with hot glue. Then she did the whole thing all over again and enclosed it in a second cloth bag. Very clever.

As for the competition itself, I'm afraid that he beat me this year. I managed to get through the first cloth bag and had almost made my way through the second one when he managed to extricate his gift from the masking tape and thumb tacks. Then again, since I snatched the game away from his seconds later, can you really call that a victory?

[Grefter]

Two things that you might want to look up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

And for next year

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoxy

Edit - Good gods how did I manage to get the H 4 characters to the left of where it should be and how the hell did that link still work.

[Ranmilia]

Shirts, money in various forms, Steam games, and Miyazaki's films on DVD.  Good stuff. 

Also merry christmas/holiday of choice to all.

[DjinnAndTonic]

My Christmas haul:

Giant Box of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups
Bottle of terrible Eastern South Australia white wine
An Orange

Best Christmas ever.

[Veryslightlymad]

A bear every year.
Maple Candy
Coffee Crisp bars (Don't Laugh, Canadians, these are hard as shit to find in the US)
White Chocolate Lindor Balls and Stracciatella Lindor Balls
Suede Gloves (The one thing I asked for)
Money Clip
A fairly nice, snug pair of slippers for college----oddly enough I actually wanted something like this and didn't even THINK to ask
A real-person shaving set featuring a safety razor, a starting kit with soap, a brush, bowl, et cetera, and a sampling of the different blades available.
Venture Bros Seasons 2 and 3
Four very very small bottles of fairly inexpensive colognes that also happen to be pretty darned good for the price. (One of which I REALLY like and figured I'd buy myself if I didn't get.)
Dollars, but the dollars were given to me with the explicit instructions that I must, in fact, spend them, and my parents are very insistent that I actually follow through.

VSM Bought himself:
Dragon Age Origins: Ultimate Edition

MORE TO COME?!

[Captain K.]

Scott Pilgrim soundtrack
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist DVD
The Greatest American Hero complete series on DVD

And don't feel bad Bard.  My eyes have been popping out at the Christmas hauls these guys have been posting for years.  Seems like the Canadians have been historically worse about it than the Americans though.

[Idun]

I got a hat.

Americans always have such large lists of gift-receiving. Must be a typical American thing, I've never seen anyone receive over $100 in gifts here.

Wrong!

I received nothing. If there are a few things that borderline poverty (in my mom's house) and growing up poorer than all my friend's have taught me is that participating in the commercial aspects of holidays isn't that necessary. It's definitely nice to receive something for Holidays, especially by people who can't express themselves better than through gift giving, but it's more of a quality than a length thing.

We baked the motherfriggin crap out of this Christmas though. Here I am thinking Thanksgiving was the break for weight gain.

[Sierra]

Our parents spend too much money on us. This has been noted before. For a couple years I tried asking people not to spend money on me at all, but they never listened. So everything below is from them unless otherwise noted:

-Iron Man 2 on DVD
-Inception on DVD
-Assassin's Creed 2 (from the brother. He liked it a ton and is hoping to make a convert. At least it sounds better than the first one)
-Various Malazan books by Erikson/Esselmont (from the brother)
-Lost season 6 on DVD (I'd said I didn't like this enough to own it, but I guess it'd already been bought by that point)
-Earthling by David Bowie (from the sister)
-God's Debris by Scott Adams (from the sister)
-A whole bunch of shirts
-A little spider robot
-A wooden statue of twined cobras
-A chess set
-Some small stuff like candy and underwear
-$650 from various other relatives

Was a pretty lazy Christmas. We went and saw my dad's parents/some cousins yesterday morning, but otherwise it was just us hanging around the parents' place watching movies. My mom's parents were originally going to come too, but my grandmother changed her mind because she's terminally ill and doesn't want anyone to remember her as a sick old lady. Disappointment, I like my mom's crazy family.

[VySaika]

Christmas was never as big of a deal for me growing up as it is with Jenna's family. Without exception, every female member of her family is the "must spend lots of money on people" type, which plays itself out during Christmas and in legendary epic battles over who gets to pick up the check at restaraunts.

[Taishyr]

gave like three books, a calendar, two gift cards and a game or two.

got two books, a gift card, the Humble Indie Bundle and free food.