The Shrine of the Holy Whapping Ultimate Catholic Nerd Gift Guide

Well, the magical, blessed time of Christmas eve has come again, and with it we find the joy of the, er, holiday season lunging at our throats. And you, good Catholic law-abiding citizen and faithful blog-reader find yourself knee-deep in crumpled—and very much unused—wrapping paper trying to remember if you went and got the correct Aragorn action figure for little Arwen, your crazy brother’s youngest—darn it, she’s into Star Wars, not Lord of the Rings.

No, you did forget, and what a relief. Because do you really want to subject the future King Elessar to the ignominy of getting thrown into the toilet bowl like some sort of pre-Medieval Ti-di-Bol man like she did to the young person’s edition of Beowulf you got her last year after realizing the only book she owned was a copy of Baby Bear Up There, and half of that she ate at age 2. Elbereth, your wife mutters under her breath in frustration with your holiday gaffe. Darn. Star Wars. That’s the one with, uh, Pizza the Hut, right?

Come now, you’re a cultured Catholic nerd with a beautiful young wife and four home schooled kids named after the saints of the Roman canon—and who are teased mercilessly for it. And now you’re reduced to rummaging around Toys Backwards Us on the eve of the birth of the Savior for merchandise from a two-year-old movie you never saw and whose principal character was a teenybopper actress dressed like the Mongolian Yak Queen.

It’s enough to make a man want to go out and stick a six-foot bloody Spanish crucifix in the yard and decorate it with Christmas lights. Not your yard, necessarily, but someone’s, at least. Maybe the Episcopalians down the street.

So, what’s a Catholic Nerd to do?

Simple. Impose your tastes on them. Heck, if they don’t like it, you can just borrow it back some time and they’ll never miss it (oh come now, surely it’s only a venial sin), and if it works, you can go and call it apologetics. Soooo, in the great holiday-Christmas-Hannukkah-Ramadan-Beltane-whatever tradition of Dave Barry’s Gift Guide, which I have quite obviously ripped off here, and then some, let’s start off on the long, lonely Calvary road of the last-minute shopper. And tell baby Anacletus if he doesn’t like the Ottaviani Intervention crib play center, he better offer it up for the Holy Souls.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t the Ottaviani Intervention make a great name for a band? (Get over it, it’s a Dave Barry pastiche, and speaking according to the norms of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, there has to be at least one bad band joke—pretty lenient considering Trent required three at the very least on pain of anathema).

So, buckle your seatbelts, yer in for a bumpy ride.

And Now, the Gifts

1. St. Benedict of Nursia Coasters and St. Benedict Beer Stein
Available from the Order of St. Benedict Website Store, $7.50 and Mount St. Benedict Holy Shop, $25

Beer is Catholic. Roma locuta, causa finita est, considering it actually has a patron saint, Arnulf of Metz. Excepting a fine red wine, I’d call it possibly the most Catholic of adult beverages, which explains most of Irish history and those frigging weird noises from the dorm room upstairs.

It’s also a very monastic drink, since most of the monks of the Middle Ages enjoyed brewing it in between bouts of chanting the Office and illuminating manuscripts. Most illustrations showing saints bilocating in original copies of the Golden Legend may result from the fact Brother Ambrose simply saw two of everything after Sext.

Anyway, what could show your devotion to the great founder of Western Monasticism, St. Benedict, than to buy a coaster showing a tasteful reproduction of a fresco of him and his monks at dinner and slam down a big ceramic beer stein on top of it, augmenting his halo with copious watermarks? Uh, don’t answer that.

2. Pope Innocent III Action Figure.
Available from Archie McPhee & Co., $8.95

The one-hundred-sixty-seventh Pope: his super action-figure powers include all that fun stuff like excommunication, binding and loosing, and, according to his promotional materials, “a removable fancy pope hat,” which I guess is a triple tiara, though it looks also sort of like a bowling pin with infulae attached. Someone call Gamerelli.

Anyway, the detail on this guy’s incredible: I can see a pallium, a dalmatic, even, get this, what looks like an amice!, and then there’s the “intimidating” Latin text on his scroll, which seems to be suggesting the Hohenstaufens do something even more humiliating than standing in the snow in Canossa, entailing kissing a particular portion of the pontifical anatomy.

For even more fun, team him up with a cassocked Neo action figure and send them through time to—oh, I dunno, maybe run Voltaire over with a minivan or something. Though, for the baby liturgy freak on your list, I suggest not bringing attention to the fact he appears to be wearing a blue alb—or tell him they caught the Pontiff in a rare liberal mood during Advent. Whatever.

I’ll willingly raise my St. Benedict stein to the folks at Archie McPhee for finally addressing the crippling lack of papal action figures in today’s toy industry. What next, a Saturday morning cartoon show? Fun.

3. Pope Pius XII Comic Book.
Available from Newkadia, prices ranging from $8-$60.

Everyone knows JP II is a comic-book hero, but what’s a good Sedevacantalist to do? I have the answer, at least until the release of the new SSPX-Men collector’s edition in 2006. I'm afraid the Matrix comic starring Catherine Pickstock is strictly available only to Ecclesia Dei supporters...

But still! Yes, the perfidious neo-Catholic lie that John Paul is the only Pope to be featured in comic-book form is exposed! Rad-trads, don’t let this propaganda hold you back any longer! What—wait—it’s in the—gasp—vernacular? Not the sacred tongue of Latin? Surely the canons of the sacred council, the perpetual indult of—

Ah—well—I always said the last real pope was Pius IX—seriously, there were these space aliens and Freemasons, and, well—never mind. I’ll just take this rosary-themed comic book instead. Wait, it includes the newfangled Luminous mysteries? Curses, foiled again!

4. Calendario Romano
Available from the Almost Corner Bookshop, Rome, € 6, but please don’t buy it, it’s just too weird

Yes, just what every (hopefully female) Catholic nerd has ever dreamed of: a Seminarian of the Month calendar! This was the latest thing at all the Roman edicole—newsstands for those of you in Rio Linda—this season, along with the nicely ideologically balanced Mussolini and Che Guevara calendars, the latter being an appropriate gift for the Jesuits on your Christmas list if you’ve run out of yarn stoles.

Frankly, though, despite the panoply of birettas, cassocks, stiff Roman collars and soulful heavenward gazes, I couldn’t help wondering exactly if these guys really were in training for the clergy, considering the amount of fashionable stubble. Maybe they’re really closet Anglo-Catholics. I dunno. Maybe not bad as an emergency gift, if you’re trying to steer that high-strung teenage vegetarian next-door neighbor into the nunnery, just tell her Rev. Mr. January will be her chaplain.

5. Nuns Having Fun 2003 Calendar
Available from Amazon.com, $22.95

Okay, forget the last one, this one’s the ultimate nerd gift of the season. And what’s not to love? Vintage shots of fully-habited fifties nuns (wearing sunglasses in some cases) kicking back fishing, roller-skating, on the bumper-cars, and more puzzlingly, “frolicking in the surf” according to the website’s anonymous blurbist. “Think big dancing penguins,” they add, which doesn’t really help the situation much and instead suggests perhaps that Amazon.com has been indulging its peyote habit again.

On the other hand, being fond of uppity women with firearms, especially habited uppity women with firearms, I have to recommend the photos of the good sisters skeet shooting. Nuns with guns, sweet. The calendar, incidentally, should recall with the black and white and sepia “an added air of nostalgia from a more innocent time,” by which I suppose they mean the Era of Fr. O’Malley.

On the other other hand, the fact that shoppers looking for this calendar also were trying to find, variously, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club 2004 Day-To-Day Calendar, 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said 2004 Calendar (They gave me a whole month), and, even more frighteningly, the Garden Gnomes 2004 Calendar makes me wonder exactly how innocent all this is, hmmm? Idiot Girls?

Conclusion

Well, that’s about it until next year. Happy frantic purchasing this Christmas eve: and don’t forget, there’s plenty of other nerdly gifts out there, from the famous Nun Dolls collection (I want one of those Pink nuns, by the way) to cardinal finger-puppets.

Or, if you’re in Rome, try hunting down Popesicles, the Popener (for your St. Benedict stein) or some commemorative Vatican Poker Chips. And for the non-Catholic social conservative on your list (or even your favorite Naderite if you want to annoy him), why not get him the talking Ann Coulter Barbie (Bill O’Reilly, I hear, owns two) or the official Club Seals, not Sandwiches tee shirt? The possibilities are infinite.

That, and Pre-Medieval Ti-di-Bol Man and the Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club would make a great name for a chant schola.