Armenian Christmas (part 1)

So today’s Armenian Christmas, and tonight y’all got to see our Armenian Christmas special. It explains why we were celebrating on January 6 and shows the festivities in full swing. The only thing is that we shot the episode ten days ago, so, like with Thanksgiving, we had to celebrate the whole holiday early…and then celebrate it for real on the real date. That meant a shit ton of work for Mrs. Bedrossian in the kitchen. She makes all traditional Armenian food, and she had to make it all twice.

And I gotta tell you that Armenian food is totally bombass. The main thing they make for Christmas is a dish of lamb and sweet rice that was amazing. I know some people have issues with lamb, and I don’t eat it very often, but it can be so dang good when you make it right…and Mrs. Bedrossian knows how to make it right. I’m afraid that I might have made something of a pig of myself on TV…but one of the things people seem to like about Baseball Boy is that he’s got a good appetite lol.

There were presents and everything for TV Christmas. Including Christmas pajamas for the family. I felt pretty honored that I was included in that – the pajamas they got mere were red flannel with reindeer…kinda like another ugly sweater – but it was weird putting them on at 3 in the afternoon on December 28 to shoot our pretend Christmas morning segment.

The Bedrossian tree is pretty dang colorful now that it’s done, even with the white lights. I said that there was a whole collection of varied ornaments, but they finished the tree, not with garland, but with a ribbon in the colors of the Armenian flag, which are red, blue and an orange that Mrs. Bedrossian told me was supposed to be the color of apricots. It looks great.

I said there were presents for the TV Christmas. Not quite. It sounds totally lameass, but what I got a wrapped box with a big bow that Ethan told me not to open…because it was empty. Turns out all the boxes under the tree for TV Christmas were empty except for a couple for the boys and one for Maya; those they opened on camera. The rest of us just held our boxes and tried to look happy. Like I said, pretty lameass…but like I’ve told y’all a few times already, reality TV isn’t always exactly real.

As for real Armenian Christmas today, it was quite a day…although not all of it was because it was Christmas… January 6 means Epiphany to me, Three Kings Day to Belen, Christmas to the Sharpmans…and, well, y’all saw what happened in Washington.

The boys made sure to let me know that they wanted me to be with the family on Christmas morning, which answered my question about when I was going to give them their presents. Maya made it clear to the boys that they weren’t supposed to wake her and Robert up until 8 on the dot, so it was a very impatient Jacob and Matteo that greeted me when I got to the hall where the tree is at 7:50, wearing my red flannel pajamas.

There were a shit ton of presents under the tree…real presents this time as opposed to nicely wrapped empty boxes. The boys are too old to believe in Santa Claus, so they knew what gift was from who. Me, Sandy and the crew all got together and decided that, with the pandemic and all, we wouldn’t buy each other gifts. Someone suggested that we get each other Amazon gift cards, but then Ethan pointed out that we could just as easy buy ourselves something on Amazon without worrying about gift card codes…and that’s what we decided to do. So the only presents I had to worry about were the ones for the boys, since Maya told everyone not to buy anything for her and Robert, either. I was real relieved at that…because I had no idea what to buy a reality TV star who looks like she has everything she could possibly want. So the Sharpman Christmas gift-giving was really about the boys, which is as it should be, I reckon.

I got the boys two gifts each, since I didn’t think they’d be too excited to just get a complete Shakespeare. But I wanted them to have them as they moved forward with their education…even though it’s easier to read Shakespeare in volumes you get one play at a time in. But, hey, I read through the complete Shakespeare we got in college on all those bus trips with the ‘Dads, so it is possible to read him that way. I wasn’t expecting Jacob and Matteo to start devouring play after play…but it’s important to have the complete works somewhere, if only so you can look up quotes and stuff.

Then I got Jacob MLB The Show 20 – the kind of baseball video game I’ve been wishing we had. Yeah, fine…I got it so I could play it with him…but, look at it this way, you don’t often get a video game and someone to play it with all at the same time lol.

Matteo has a great big stuffed animal collection. Some of them are real cute, and he’s got some pretty exotic animals I’ve never heard of. I mean, like something called a tapir and something else called an okapi. He really likes Australian animals, and he’s got a ton of them, but he told me once he didn’t have a wombat. So I did some research on Amazon and found him a stuffed wombat. It’s actually pretty cute, I think. But I’m not an expert on stuffed animals. Matteo, who is an expert, said he really liked it and was gonna research an Australian name for what he decided was a him.).

I think I did well with my gifts. The boys even started flipping through their complete Shakespeares, just to see the names of some of the plays. Matteo asked me what Twelfth Night was. It was kinda cool to explain that the title meant today. I thought we might read a little of the play after dinner…but that didn’t turn out the way I was expecting it would.

The boys, if y’all will remember, got me a Charlie Brown nativity set on December 25, so I kinda figured that would be their gift to me. Turns out I was wrong, and I had something else under the tree this morning: a super cool skinny black satin straight tie that I can wear as a change of pace with my tuxedo. I wasn’t sure how the boys knew that exactly, but then I opened the present that Maya and Robert got me and it made sense. That came in a small box, and turned out to be a set of totally badass cufflinks that look like baseball gloves holding baseballs. Maya told me they were gold, mostly (she said) so I should know to be careful with them. The gloves are gold gold while the balls are white gold. I wasn’t entirely sure what Joyce was going to say, since she gave me the cufflinks and studs I’ve worn thus far with my tux…but I reckon it’s not bad if you can change off…and you see a lot of Hollywood types wearing straight ties with their tuxedos (although Corey Seager wore a bowtie to his wedding last month.)

There was something else under the tree with a card that said “to Jacob, Matteo & Hunter”. I was real puzzled. It was about the size of a tie box, was very light when we picked it up, and none of us had any idea what it could be. We unwrapped it together (that meant tearing the paper to shreds…and, although the packages at Maya’s didn’t look like the ones Joyce wraps, they still looked great)…and it turned out to contain…

…a brochure for…

…pitching machines.

“We wanted to get one, since Jacob and Matteo both told us that you say you can’t help them with their hitting properly when you’re pitching to them…but we didn’t understand all the different options,” Maya explained. “You know more about it than any of us, so you should pick out the model you think is best for the boys. You can set it up on the tennis court.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’ve…I’ve never had my own batting cage. You’re also going to need…”

“Whatever is necessary,” said Robert, metaphorically handing me what I reckon amounted to a blank check for baseball equipment. I kinda felt for Matteo a little, since me and Jacob were excited about what was supposed to be a present for both of them…and I don’t think he cared a whole heck of a lot about a pitching machine and whatever went with it.

And, like Sandy said, there were bonuses. Robert handed those out after we opened our presents. I had no idea how much to expect, but I was pleased with the amount when I looked inside the envelope. I talked to Sandy about it later on and she said that Maya and Robert are generous but not crazy generous with bonuses, and that she was pleased with what she got, too. She works dang hard for Maya as her personal assistant (her job is way harder than mine, even if she doesn’t have to deal with kids), so I’m sure she deserves everything she gets.

Then Maya cooked us a big bacon-and-egg breakfast (no chocolate gravy lol) and I went back to the pool house to change out of my pajamas and shower and shave. I’m not totally out of it when it comes to current events, so I switched on the TV to see if I could find out anything about the Georgia senate races…