As Christmas rapidly approaches, my thoughts have mostly been on all of the work I need to get done before the holiday wipes out my company’s productivity. Emails will go unanswered for weeks, attention spans will be shortened, project starts will be resolutely postponed until after the new year, and meetings will be impossible to arrange.

But I also can’t help thinking about all those warm memories of Christmases past, and all those things that make the holidays great: You know, presents. (Yes, yes, it’s the honest emotional connections to friends and family that make life worth living, but all those stories are far too personal—and, more importantly, dull—to share. So, let’s talk about goodies.)

Though we never had a lot of money, my parents always made sure to save up enough dough to give us kids some really awesome gifts. Did this make up for the previous 11 months of neglect, guilt, and fear? Let me put it this way: for Christmas, 1989, I received a Game Boy. So, in other words, hell yeah, it did! That’s a tale for another day, though. Let’s talk, instead, about the year I received the gift of music.

The story really starts with a few days during summer vacation that my brother and I spent with our aunt and uncle. They were a fun, childless couple (at the time), who were renown for their grand adventures, and for always showing up  at least two hours late to every family event. They also tended to have some pretty sweet gear. (The first VCR I ever saw was theirs.)

This particular summer, (I can’t remember the exact year) they introduced me to two devices that I coveted very badly. (I was a selfish child.) One was an early laptop computer, and the other was a Casiotone keyboard. The computer I was definitely not allowed to touch (I must have been only seven or eight at the time, with nasty jam-covered fingers). The keyboard, however….

I recall very clearly spending what must have been hours with the damn thing. Sitting there on the floor in the spare room noodling away was some of the best fun I’d ever had, up to that point. Twiddle your fingers on the keys and sound comes out. I couldn’t get over that!

I didn’t know anything about music, I just messed around. But it was such enjoyable messing that it didn’t matter. It helped that my aunt told me to “just play the white keys”, because that meant everything I played was in key and sounded okay. (I didn’t realize you could play chords, either.)

I’m not sure if I returned home begging for a keyboard, or if my aunt or uncle  reported on my new-found fascination to my parents, but either way, that Christmas I was given a Casiotone of my very own.

It was an MT-220 (I had to look that up, just now), and it was cheesy. Casiotones were famous for their bravery: They actually insisted upon naming the bizarre sounds they made after real instruments! Talk all you want about Vowel-Consonant Synthesis, the real science behind Casio’s keyboard sounds was human suggestibility. If that sound wasn’t labeled “trumpet” you’d never guess that that’s what they were after.

Well,the Christmas I received that little keyboard of my very own was a very musical one, I can assure you. Thank god for the headphone jack.

I was obsessed with the thing; for months I toyed with it constantly, though I never actually asked for (nor was I offered) piano lessons. Who needed them? For one thing, I had been scared off music lessons by countless TV shows and cartoons that made learning how to play the piano look like some form of medieval torture, and for another, how much training did you need to get great-sounding farting bass notes from the Funky Clavi setting? Of course, over the years the interest waned. A few years later I got a guitar, and the old MT-220 was forgotten. For a while, anyway.

Did I ever tell you about the time I recorded a five song EP using only the MT-220, a CT-310, and a boombox?

Oh look, I’m out of time. Some other day, perhaps.