Written by Zach Harper | 24 December 2008

Okay.  We all need to stick together on this.  Christmas comes with a lot of pressure, commitments, and responsibilities through the holiday.  For those of you who do not celebrate the holiday due to philosophical or religious beliefs, consider yourself lucky this year.  For those of you who do celebrate it, consider yourself screwed.  The NBA has provided us with four potentially fantastic games and one match-up that looks like it will be over by the time Grandpa passes out. 

Here are the games with times and stations:

New Orleans at Orlando, 9am PST on ESPN
San Antonio at Phoenix, 12:30pm PST on ABC
Boston at LA Lakers, 2pm PST on ABC
Washington at Cleveland, 5pm PST on TNT
Dallas at Portland, 7:30pm PST on TNT

Other than the Wizards-Cavs snoozer, that is a loaded day of basketball. Unfortunately for someone like myself, I will be bouncing around from home to home on Christmas Day trying to hit up as many people in my first and second family as possible. Between my family and my girlfriend's family, we'll be fitting three different houses (her parents, her grandparents, and my parents) into 12 jam-packed, egg nog soaked, tinsel laden, gift-wrapped hours of holiday and magical bliss.  It would be much easier if I knocked up my girlfriend in a Shawn Kemp-on-the-road role-play kind of way and made everyone convene at our house but much like Calvin Murphy, I just can't support kids at this point in my life. 

So with the hand that has been dealt to me, between the great basketball and traveling around the city of Sacramento, it appears that I will miss out on a great day of basketball. 

Or will I?

It's entirely possible to fulfill my familial obligations whilst taking in every game of the day and at the same time not alienating a group of people that I should be showering with gifts on this day.  It's entirely possible to see Chris Paul's steals crash head on with Dwight Howard's blocks in a battle for Defensive Player of the Year, the Spurs and Suns claw and scratch at each other, the Celtics take their 19-game win streak against the second best team in the league, watch LeBron James put on a dunk contest in the first half against the Wiz, and see a Brandon Roy-Dirk Nowitzki shootout. 

How do you do it, you ask?  Let me give you six tips/strategies to employ and then give you my plan of attack.

Tip 1 - Go buy something electronic for a family member and set it up
Tip 2 - Get food that can double as something that makes your family tired. (similar to the affect turkey has on people)
Tip 3 - Pay a friend to create a diversion
Tip 4 - Say that a special Christmas Day parade is on after (fill in game here) and that it's supposed to be a legendary opening number
Tip 5 - Start a family argument
Tip 6 - When all else fails, there's always ESPN's Streak for the Cash Christmas Day Special

So many of you are thinking that a) these tips are brilliant but not necessarily applicable, b) these tips are asinine and there's no way they'd work, c) you just wasted part of your morning reading this, d) you're very curious how I'm going to make this work for my own situation, or e) you knew Tom Cruise couldn't pull off the performance in Valkyrie.

Well, let me explain to you how I plan on putting this ... plan ... to work.  As a backup in case everything goes awry, I will have every game TiVoed for my viewing pleasure at a later time.  Five games in HD will take up a lot of space so I'm going to have to clear out every bad TV show and movie that we've cued up to give my DVR the adequate space.  That means all the Real Housewives of Whatever, wedding shows, movies from the 90s that I figured would be cool to watch again, old episodes of Conan O'Brien, and basically everything else except for my greatest 50 moments of Larry Bird show will be gone. 

My girlfriend and I are starting off the morning by waking up in our own home and exchanging stockings with each other.  I figure if we get up around 8am, it will give us enough time to get ready, exchange the oversized socks filled with stuff, play with the dog for a little bit and then head off to her parents' house to exchange more oversized socks filled with stuff and a few presents.  We live about five to ten minutes away so travel time won't necessarily kill us in terms of cutting into the first game of the Hornets against the Magic.  We'll probably arrive there shortly after nine in the morning and eat a little food.  Luckily for me, we have purchased an electronic device that may or may not involve watching television (I'm fairly sure they wouldn't read this but in case they do for some reason, I have to be a little vague here).  And luckily for me, it's going to take my know-how and technological ingenuity to set it up for them.  Which means the first thing I will turn to is the Hornets' game about 25 to 35 minutes into it.  But I'm sure that ESPN has oversold so much ad space that I'll have only missed the introductions, jump ball (I'll miss the technique, Wade), and the first three possessions for each team. 

As you can see there, I have implemented Tip 1 to my benefit here.  We were already getting them something to do with electronics and television.  So I'm using that in my favor to set up an opportunity to view it.  It will hopefully get her dad sucked into the game and I'll get a good couple of hours of having it on in the background as I utilize my God-given and exceptional peripheral vision. If you can't afford it, don't worry.  Buy something on credit, take it over, install it, and then eventually take it back when they aren't looking. You can return it the day after Christmas and take advantage of some post-Christmas sales. 

After I take in the Hornets-Magic game with the future parents-in-law, we're going to head to my girlfriend's grandparents house with her parents to have a nice little mid-morning, early afternoon Christmas get-together.  This is where I will implement Tip #2.  I know that if I can get her grandpa to turn to the game and be into it, then I'm set for the next four hours at minimum.  It's not going to be feasible to bring out turkey and try to tryptophan them into a nice sleep that will allow me to turn on the big screen and get the Spurs-Suns battle going.  So I'll have to be very covert about this.  What will be the sleepy treat of choice?  Yep, you guessed it - chloroform brownies.

Now some people might think that it's probably some kind of crime to give people chloroform brownies.  Some might even call it unethical.  That's not for me to judge.  I'm not going to decide what are crimes and what aren't crimes.  And neither should you.  You're not doing this to hurt anybody.  That's the important thing to remember.  This will get me the entire Spurs-Suns game and I'll get to check out the next installment of this Western Conference battle.  If the chloroform brownies don't take right away, then I'll have to implement Tip #4. Older people are suckers for a good holiday parade and I'm going to use that to my advantage.  That, my friends, is what we call knowing your opponent and following the scouting report. 

I'm going to have to make up that the Christmas Day Parade has the best opening act that they've ever created.  It's going to involve Andy Williams, Luciano Pavarotti, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Beyonce Knowles (people love her). Katie Couric is going to fight Santa Claus in the Octagon while Al Roker and Brian Williams arm-wrestle.  There will be fireworks, a laser show, and Oprah Winfrey giving out cities as presents.  But this will only happen when the Spurs-Suns game ends. And we should watch until the end of the game to make sure we don't miss anything.  

Depending on the mixture that I concoct for the brownies (Assuming they work; I'm not great with science), everybody should be awake by the time the Celtics-Lakers game.  I know that I can get the men in the family to want to watch the game with me.  With a 2pm start time, it's going to get very tricky.  I'm probably only getting to halftime before I have to move on from the grandparents-in-laws house to my own parents house.  So we have to be quick to get out of there when the second quarter ends.  This is where the chloroform brownies will have helped the most (assuming they work).  Grogginess will be the key to quick goodbyes because they'll probably want to go back to sleep. 

So as we head to my parents house, I'm going to have to call in some reinforcements.  We should get to my parents house right when halftime is over and I'll be asking the Not-So Resident Cynic, Andy Eisner, from our podcast to help me out by implementing Tip #3.  He's going to create a diversion.  Since his mom's house is right down the street from my parents' house, he'll be in close proximity to where I need him to be.  I'll have him crash his car into a telephone poll to on the corner of the street.  This should get my parents out of the house for a good 45 minutes, which will allow me to watch the entire third quarter and a good chunk of the fourth as well.  By the time everybody else comes back into the house to resume Christmas, the fourth quarter will be winding down and everyone will be more than willing to watch the rest of the game.

That's going to give us three out of three games with two to go.  But getting them to be willing to watch a terrible Wizards-Cavs game is going to be extremely tricky.  So I'll have to implement Tip #5 and start a family argument.  Normally, it would have been easy with my sister living here because someone was bound to butt heads.  But with her out of the country, it's going to be much trickier.  So I'm going to have to pull out the big guns - I'm going to give them a surprise visit from my grandma.  Trust me; it will cause a fight. 

While this fight goes on, I can get the first half of the Wiz-Cavs game in, which will be the only part worth watching.  By the time we head to halftime, I'll be ready for Christmas dinner with a family that has made up and is ready to be back in the holiday spirit.  We'll enjoy a wonderful dinner, have some drinks, and enjoy each other's company.  We'll sit down and open presents.  We'll have more drinks and light a fire.  I'm not going to worry about the second half of the Cavs game because it will be like watching a rec league team playing the 1988 Eastern Conference All-Star team. 

So that will make four (ish) games out of four (ish) games on a very successful Christmas Day.  But we're going to have to implement our final tip in order to get a hassle free Mavericks-Blazers viewing.  The ESPN Streak for the Cash game is a fantastic way to earn a lot of money for doing relatively nothing (A.K.A. - the Stephon Marbury).  On Christmas Day, they're giving you sixteen selections to make involving the five basketball games.  A perfect sixteen for sixteen will result in the player winning $100,000.  If you can't get the perfect sixteen, then the highest streak of consecutive correct guesses will win $10,000 and a trip to the 2009 All-Star Game in Phoenix. 

I plan on doing very well with this little contest even if I don't win it.  I may not be victorious but the chance to win that kind of money will be enough to trick my parents into being into this final game on Christmas Day.  The day will be a success because I'll get to spend time with the people I love and I'll get to watch the game that I adore.  It will be the best Christmas ever on many levels. 

I just have to make sure I get the right mix of chloroform and brownie ingredients. 

Happy Holidays, everybody!

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