I got up to feed the dogs and discovered what Shel has been hinting at for weeks. She made me an Advent calender! This is the coolest thing ever, and I am very excited.
I love Advent. I always have. (Yes, it's a Christian tradition, and perhaps in its relative obscurity, should be regarded as even "more Christian" than Christmas - if Christianity is a sliding scale.) The anticipation of that which is to come is heightened by the gradual parceling out of goodies. I grew up with the little chocolate-filled paper advent calenders and, once or twice had calenders without candy but with carefully-placed doors which opened to reveal nativity scenes. When I heard about Suzanne's kid getting a Lego(r) advent calender, I felt some envy - I must confess. When Shel got annoyed at having to stop me from buying myself an Advent calender at Cost Plus International Market, I began to get excited.
As any of you who has ever received a handmade gift before know, hand-made is better by far than store-bought. No, I don't want a hand-made Tag-Heuer watch. You know what I mean. A gift assembled for you by someone who knows and loves you is really something special. This gift is a perfect example.
Shel knows I love Advent - or at least that I love Advent calenders. She knows that I prefer high-quality, durable things over disposable crap. She knows that I enjoy Lindt chocolates (Not rocket surgery, that - fish enjoy water, too. Who doesn't like Lindt?) Most of all, though, Shel knows that I have a deep and abiding nostalgia for G.I.*Joe. I spent many of the most enjoyable hours of my life playing with, posing, writing about, drawing, yearning for, talking about, arranging and rearranging, organizing, caring for, and destroying my G.I.*Joe toys and file cards. I even wrote letters to Hasbro suggesting new characters. While other kids were moving on to Michael Jackson and Tiffany and methamphetamines, I was typing file cards into the computer so I could quickly and easily select characters by their primary and secondary military specialties. When other kids were making jokes about Christa McAuliffe, I was plotting Destro's takeover of Cobra and trying to figure out how he would transform it from a terrorist organization into a profit-making enterprise. I loved me some G.I.*Joe.
This morning, I came into the den to discover the Advent calender below. I opened the door marked "1" to find Cobra Commander curled up in the fetal position inside next to a Lindt dark chocolate Lindor truffle! The fetal position!
Anyone who's ever played with G.I.*Joes knows that the old ones could never assume the fetal position and would not last long if one tried. This little guy is far better articulated than anything I played with as a kid. The sculpt is painstakingly done. The paint is almost perfect. It is too cool!
While the toy has been re-imagined to allow freer movement, the concept is the same, and the sculpt is obviously based on the same concept art that governed the creation of those toys all those years ago. Only one of the sibilant one's hands could ever hope to hold anything - the left one is curled into a fist, and his windswept hood is hard plastic rather than the fairly firm rubber or old, one can peek under this one's shroud to see some skin-tight red garment covering his neck. He still has the gig-line to make Tim Gunn cry and the silly leggings that strap under the heels of his boots, but now he also has ankle joints. Gone is the in-torso rubber band and the funky metal hip joint thing. CC now has a ball joint in his lower torso. The arms will lay flat against its sides. The sculpt is a little thin - his pants look like those skin-tight chick pants that kids wear now, but let's face it - if anybody was ever emo, it was Cobra Commander.
If I was bent on world-domination through terror and intimidation by the employment of overly-complex and needlessly public and hyper-dramatic plans that Dr. Evil himself would scoff at, I'd hope to be this cool.
COBRA!
(I think I might hire somebody to come up with a more imaginative war-cry, though)
