What's the best Christmas present you ever received?

It's hard to pick one, so instead I'll pick the best I've ever given.

It's impossible to find a gift for my dad, he buys whatever he wants. At one point when I was in college he was really into old maps and spoke about a specific one at a store where California was depicted as an island from ~1700s. He also used to get really animated talking about the place-names of early California, like Earthquake Bay and other scary names, he joked that California did a great job of marketing during the Gold Rush.

I had to borrow some money to afford it, but it was so timely and exactly the kind of thing he wouldn't buy for himself, and ended up buying the map for ~$1500. It was worth every penny.

I also learned that of course we knew California wasn't an island by then, but folks still liked having maps to display that showed it as such as a tongue in cheek bit of fun.

I let my dad pay the cost of putting the thing in a UV protected frame though!

For a quick look at maps like that: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/zb871zd0767

Off the top of my head, I'd have to say Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. (aka GEB) I was in my mid/late-20's and always interested in math and computers but pretty much low-level applied things. I read that book over the holidays cover-to-cover having my mind blown chapter after chapter. It was a page-turner. And I'm sure if I were to read it all over, I would rediscover it as well as getting into more depth and appreciating some of the other story/topic threads that I was less interested in at the time.

The real answer though is my first computer, an Atari 400 8-bit machine--though I think I got it way before Christmas. I had been bugging my parents about a home computer all summer, first it was the Sinclair ZX-81 then maybe the TI-99/4a. These were all very expensive for a kid, so I declared it as my xmas/birthday and whatever presents all rolled into one, but I wanted it now. The VIC-20 was garbage and between the C64 and Atari, well I wanted to make video games and Atari was synonymous with that. To keep price down, I got the computer with Basic and Asteroids cartridges--so storage of any kind. I learned to code in basic and assembly (actually the machine codes as I had no assembler software I could load, so it was decimal numbers or strings poked into ram from basic). With no storage, I'd admire a program I spent days making for a while then power-cycle so I could play asteroids. I'm glad I skipped the cassette storage and got the floppy drive next year, which was like getting an HDD at that time for me. I learned things on that little machine that I still have vivid memories of and relate to in my thought processes solving problems.

An old notebook (PC) when i was about 11. I learned programming in Turbo Pascal and Delphi on it. Had to install Delphi through an LPT connection to the family PC because it "only" had a floppy drive (and also lacked a network card) and Borland Delphi came on CD. To this day, I am amazed that this was possible with Win95 at all (although it took multiple hours).

Well, at least that's qualifying for "best" by impact :)

If judging by longevity: A Merkur Solingen razor I still own and use.

That’s a tough call.

Two of the best were:

* a moped when I was 14 (if I remember right). I told that story on my personal blog a while back and am not sure it is kosher to link here.

* a camera (specifically, a Pentax K-1000) a couple of years later, which gave me a lifelong photography bug. Not that I’m any good at it, but I still take photos (and still have the K-1000).

There was also the Christmas my dad gave me my first rifle, but I don’t want to stir the pot on HN…

Christmas day 1991 when the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time

A go-kart when I was a kid

A shot glass with a drunk penguin typing rm -rf into a terminal.