Best Christmas presents ever

Gene Steinmeyer

I must be obsessed with Christmas, but I had to write about it one more time.

Do you remember the best Christmas present you ever received?

I guess you would have to qualify that by your age at the time of the present. It would be hard to say that the electric train set I received around age 6 was not the best. Setting up those tracks and taking charge of the controls was pretty special.

I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up. That meant the cowboy boots I received from Santa hit a lot of high points. I had the western shirt I wore only during the Roy Rogers Show on Saturday mornings. Now, I had boots to go with the shirt. My cowboy hat was a little weak, so I’ll skip over that one altogether.

Those presents were really cool. The coolest of all the Christmas presents came around the age of 12. I got up early that Christmas morning to find a single shot 16-guage shotgun under the tree. My younger brother received a similar 4-10 shotgun.

I had been a constant menace to the sparrow population with my BB gun. My grandfather had allowed me to borrow his .22 rifle to kill pigeons that pooped too much in the hay loft. With a shotgun, the wild life in and around Clatonia better take cover because I was locked and loaded and ready to bring meat home to my family.

My hunting career started better than I could have expected. Dad took my brother and me hunting for pheasant and quail. We hadn’t walked more than a quarter mile in some tall grass when a rooster pheasant flushed near me.

I raised my shotgun, pointed in the general direction of the frightened bird and fired. A puff of feathers and the pheasant fell from the sky. I rushed to see my first conquest, but the pheasant’s legs weren’t injured and it ran for cover. We searched high and low, but that pheasant couldn’t be found.

We started stomping through the grass again. It didn’t take very long before another rooster startled me by flying up very near my position. Again I raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger. Again there was a puff of feathers and a rooster pheasant fell from the sky. This time the bird was dead in the grass. It was my first kill.

I’d like to tell you I was a great shot that routinely reached my limits on birds. In truth, it was beginners luck. I was a terrible shot. The pheasant population was pretty safe when I headed to the fields. Additional kills were few and far between.

I have a 15-year-old son, Sam. We have never got into hunting like I did as a kid. However, Sam and I are sports junkies. I’m not real sure, but I think this year’s Christmas present will rank pretty high on Sam’s all-star list.

Sam’s favorite NBA team is the Oklahoma City Thunder. His favorite player is the Thunder’s Kevin Durant. Sam’s Christmas wish was to see the Thunder play.

It just so happened the Thunder played the Phoenix Sun on New Year’s Eve. Under the tree were plane tickets, game tickets and a hotel reservation. It didn’t take much wrapping paper to make it look like a treasure under the Christmas tree.

At 4:45 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, Sam and I began our memorable 48-hour trip with the best Christmas present ever. Good things started early for Sam. As we boarded a plane in St. Louis, only two seats remained on the sold-out flight to Oklahoma City.

Sam quickly grabbed the aisle seat by a very attractive woman and a well-built man. I got stuck in the middle between a 400-pound man at the window and a 300-pound woman on the aisle. I now know how the peanut butter feels in a sandwich.

About the time Sam was leaving the seat after the plane landed, someone yelled, “How’s the knee, Sam?” They weren’t talking to Sam, my son, but Sam Bradford, the St. Louis Rams’ injured quarterback, sitting with his girlfriend.

Did Sam take a picture or get an autograph? No; Sam said, “Cool, that’s my name.” That earned Sam a knuckle-bump from the NFL quarterback.

The vacation company had made a mistake and our hotel was upgraded to the Hilton Gardens in Bricktown compared to a Best Western eight miles out. Our ninth floor window looked over the Bricktown baseball diamond.

At 5:30 we made the walk to Chesapeake Arena for the 7 p.m. game. Our seats weren’t great, but we were about to spend New Year Eve’s watching our first NBA game. It was a perfect game.

The first plus was Durant played his first game after sitting out five games with an ankle injury. What could be better than a fight with seven seconds to go before halftime? Russell Westbrook was kicked out of the game.

The game went into overtime. Durant went off for 44 points. The Suns missed a last-second three-point field goal and the Thunder won 136-134 in overtime. It was the highest-scoring game in the NBA game this year.

By 6 p.m. on New Year’s Day, we were watching the NCAA football playoffs from our living room.

What could be more perfect except maybe if we had found that first dead pheasant?