Long ago, back when I was in kindergarten at Rolla Grade School, every morning I would take a ride on Ol’ Trusty Yellow School Bus #7. And almost every morning, I would always sit next to that one kid in our class who would eat glue. You know what I’m talking about–everyone had one of those kids in their class growing up.
“Elmer”–as I’ll call him for obvious reasons–may have been a bit of a spaz, but he was still my tried-and-true Bus Buddy. Indeed, there was a bond of trust there that was simply unbreakable.
On the last day of school before Christmas break, we sat next to each other on the bus just like every other morning. But unlike most school day mornings, the crisp Kansan air was abuzz with excitement and anticipation. After all, it was one of the few truly exciting days on the school calendar: Santa Day.
Now, there were many reasons for a kid to get pumped about Santa Day, but the one item on the itenary relevant to today’s holiday tale was the class gift exchange. I’m sure most everybody experienced these growing up, where you would bring a small gender-appropriate gift to school, which would in turn be distributed via a random sex-segregated drawing.
Since we had a level of trust like none other, Elmer naturally confided to me that his gift was…*suspiciously looks around to see if anyone is within earshot*…a set of 5 Hot Wheels cars.
That was a pretty decent gift for a 5-to-6-year-old boy, I thought.
For me, though, it wasn’t really a matter of how much I trusted him, per se, cuz I couldn’t keep a ----- secret to save my life. So, yes, of course I excitedly shared with him that wrapped up in my little package was….*eagerly looks around to see if anyone is within earshot, because hey, I got some inside info and what good is it if only one other person knows I’m so special?*…a set of wooden toy road signs.
He agreed that that was a pretty nifty gift as well.
Pleased with ourselves that we had Top Secret intel that no one else had, we spent the rest of our bus ride dreamily wondering aloud what super-cool toy the Universe would endow upon us at the gift exchange…
I have feeling that it won’t exactly come as a shock when I tell you that roughly an hour later we discovered that–surprise, surprise–Father Fate is a real dickhead to little kids who can’t keep secrets.
Sure as reindeer shit, we ended up drawing each other’s names, totally destroying the sacred element of surprise that every other little boy and girl got to enjoy that morning. I wouldn’t quite say Christmas was ruined, but it sure was a let down.
But on the bright side, I learned a new and very useful vocabulary word that day. Here, let me use it in a sentence for you:
“You’ve got to be ----- kidding me.”
The point of the story is, kids, if you know what is good for you, you’ll keep your dang mouths shut when it comes to Christmas gifts. The Yuletide magic you save may very well be your own.
I now would like to leave you, my Dear Readers, with a little bonus in your stockings this year: just for kicks, exactly how fool-hardy was it for Elmer & I to tell each other what our gifts were? Was it a just a fluke that we ended up with each other’s gifts, or we were actually tempting fate with our ill-advised actions?
Much like we did with Birthday Twins, let’s calculate the probability of such an event. Thankfully, it’s not as complicated this time around.
Assuming that there’s a protocol in place to prevent us from getting our own gifts, then there is 1 out of (the total number of boys in our class minus one) chance that one of us gets the other’s gift. My fact-checker tells me that there were 8 boys in the kindergarten class of ’87, so we’re looking at a 1/7, or ~14.3% probability.
What we really need to know, though, is what are the odds of two events both happening: I get his gift and he gets mine. This one is easy: we just multiply the two probabilities–in this case both 14.3%–to reveal that there was ~2% chance of this happening (approximately 1 in 50).
Now there’s a possibility that this actually happened in first grade, when there were only 7 of us boys, in which case those numbers come out to 1 in 36, or a 2.8% chance.
The irony here is that I just calculated those odds as I wrote this, and I thought I was going to laugh at how bad kids are at estimating such things. But, really, adult-me fully expected those numbers to be much higher, given the small size of the classes in our Podunk town. So it turn out I’m the one with crappy risk-reward intuition, eh?
Well, this disgression didn’t turn out as I had expected. So much for a “Christmas Miracle”…
Anyways, Happy Merry Christmas Eve! Or, for the Rest of Us, today1The day I wrote this, not the day you’re reading it, that is. is the day when we can officially say…Happy Festivus!
Content created on: 23 December 2020 (Wednesday)
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