The holidays are upon us and if you live by the motto "You are your favorite team", then the purse strings are tight for you as you attempt to pay off the ridiculous bills you've accrued in the past two years, making a series of overly extravagant purchases while also trying to check if the young boys you met in the Dominican Republic are of legal drinking age in Mexico, because seriously, when you say you want somebody young, then there's a huge difference between 21 year old ass and 16 year old ass, and in the process of making sure that these boys fit in baseball pants correctly, you've gone to the trouble of actually hiring somebody to help verify this sort of thing and make sure everything at least appears on the up and up.
So...
What are you supposed to do about gifts?
Well, since you've probably have already decided to serve dinner a la Jalapeno Handshake, let Gaslamp Ball be your guide to some very inexpensive gifts for the fellow Padres fan in your life, because San Diego winters are only miserable if you're a Padres fan with expensive taste.
Printed Copy of Hard Times by Charles Dickens
You think you're miserable? Well Charles Dickens knew misery and he captured it eloquently in his classic Hard Times. Wait till everybody's gone home from work for the day, download yourself a copy and print away. You can tell people that Dickens wrote the book in part because he was running out of money and he had to sell some sh_t quick. Bonus points if you sneak into the Padres front office and actually use their printer and paper. That'll show 'em. [h/t Core77]
Ticket Stub Bookmarks
This is probably the last year that you'll be able to give a bookmark and not have it represent some quaint antiquity of when we lived in a paper-based society. In the future, things such as "dog ears" will only mean the ears of a dog and "cover to cover" will be what people do when caught in the rain without an umbrella. This year though, rifle through your paper-based copy of A Feast for Crows and grab an old ticket stub that you've been using as a bookmark. You don't want to just hand somebody that though. That would be pathetic and a little insulting. Instead, find yourself some nice yarn, a lighter weight and gauge works best. Punch a hole through one end of the ticket. Strengthen it with some scotch tape and tie a nice little bow to the end of it like those old Garfield bookmarks you used to buy when the bookmobile came through and all the Choose Your Own Adventures had already been bought up, but you had that $1.50 burning a hole in your spendy little pocket.
Guatemalan Worry Dolls in the Likeness of Jeff Moorad, Tom Garfinkel and Josh Byrnes
Does the front office not seem worried about 2012? Well, maybe your home made version of them in the form of a Guatemalan Worry Doll will carry more of the psychological burden of fielding another last place team! Take like... a stick or something... about an inch long, start wrapping string and thread around it, dress it up in a suit, add some facial features and voila! You have yourself a Padres Executive that your loved one can whisper their Padres based troubles to. Traditionally, they can then smother their newly created GM/President/Owner under their pillow along with a list of demands and apply pressure until they're no longer worried about our teams (mis)fortunes. Cause like... the doll is doing the worrying for them.... [Another Core77 h/t]
Inspirational Quote Framed Ticket Stub
This one is a bit easier if you have an old frame laying around. Gluestick the stub to the center of a piece of paper. Look up whether or not the game was a win or a loss. If it was a loss, then write the words "We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. -Kenji Miyazawa" or "Behind every cloud is another cloud. -Judy Garland" underneath the ticket and stick it in the frame. If it was a win, write the words, "At least it was a victory and at least we won. -Bobby Moore".
A Bob Scanlan Hair Doll
If there's one thing we know about Bob Scanlan from TV, it's that he and Johnny Weisbarth love themselves some Roundtable Pizza. If there's two things we know, it's that they both get their hair cut at SuperCuts. Go to SuperCuts. Offer to sweep up around the chairs for free. Take the hair home and make a Bob Scanlan hair doll out of it. Then give it to your friend who's obsessed with Bob Scanlan or me or jbox, but we're not obsessed with Bob Scanlan though. It's not like that. Actually, don't give that to me. That'd be weird. If anybody asks, tell them it fell out of Bob Scanlan's hair that way when you were watching him take a shower.
Free Tour of Petco Park
Petco Park actually has tours that you can pay for and they'll take your all around the inside of the park and stuff, but there are a couple of problems with this: A) You live in San Diego and 364 out of the 365 days in the year, you'd rather be outside and B) The person giving the tour, despite claiming to be born and raised in San Diego, is actually a transplant from Arizona who would rather be watching Sun Devil baseball than walking you around empty hallways. Therefore you have two options... The first is to draw a little map of Petco Park and create your own walking tour. Start with this:
And then just make up stuff about the area... Like, "Oh hey there's San Diego Orthodontists... That's where Bobby Doerr got his braces removed when he was with the PCL Padres" or "Did you know that Lolita's is where Wyatt Earp first learned both about baseball and the carne asada burrito? True story."
Your second option is to call up the Padres season ticket office and give them the name and phone number of the person you're creating a gift for. Tell the office that your friend is very much interested in season tickets for 2012 through 2015 and would like to know a good time to come down to talk to somebody and maybe take a tour. Be sure to tell the rep that your friend does not like a hard sale, but is definitely interested so that they don't start the conversation off with some ridiculous insane question like, "So what kind of seats do you want?" The trick is getting the tour. Then, once you have a date, tell your friend that you've set up the private tour and give them the time and person to meet.
And that's it for 2011... Get cracking, cheapies!
If you do end up making any of these, please email me a photo and I'll add it to Pinterest or something.
Go Padres