This morning I turned in my Angel Tree package at work. This year, it was for a seven year-old boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I was seven, my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos<\/em>. The book is well-loved and sits, to this day, on the bookshelf in my dining room. I tried to get things that I thought were interesting and that I would have liked when I was seven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s a mixture of stuff — a couple of books (including a Playmobil retelling of The House of the Baskervilles<\/em><\/a>), a Marvel Comics wall calendar, a board game, some off-brand LEGO that looked interesting, toothbrushes and toothpaste, two animated Batman DVDs (thanks, Dollar Tree!), a Beatles coloring book<\/a>, a box of crayons, a yo-yo, and a couple of other things. Though it was wrapped, I was unable to fit a Bob Ross 300-piece puzzle in the box; I simply ran out of room, and no amount of rearranging the block like tetrominoes would have made a difference. I would have liked to have included a piece of clothing, but I have no idea what size the boy wears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Participating in the Angel Tree program at work is something I try to do every year. I take it seriously. It’s important to me. Is the Salvation Army objectively awful? Yes. Is there a seven year-old boy who needs a better Christmas? Also yes. The latter outweighs the former for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whoever you are, little dude, enjoy the Batman: The Brave and the Bold<\/em> DVD and the books and the toothpaste and all the rest. You deserve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This morning I turned in my Angel Tree package at work. This year, it was for a seven year-old boy. When I was seven, my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. The book is well-loved and sits, to this day, on the bookshelf in my dining room. I tried to getContinue reading “An Angel Tree Package”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[236,64,4825],"class_list":["post-32401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-angel-tree","tag-christmas","tag-salvation-army","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}