I had considered myself pretty well prepared for the Christmas weekend. The supplies for the enormous Christmas Eve feast were laid in well in advance. The bicycle for the little one was assembled, the tree watered, and the gifts stowed under the tree. I even had a huge stockpile of AA batteries ready. Last Christmas had taught me to expect an onslaught of battery-powered toys sent by malicious relatives.

If you don’t have children, then you don’t know the agonies that toymakers have been busy inflicting on parents since the 1970s. A trip through a twenty-first century toy store, as told by those who have survived the experience with a modicum of sanity still intact, subjects you to a cacophony of electronic noise. All sorts of toys now emit bleeps, boops, horrible digitized children’s songs, voices, and music loops so irritating that normally rational people are driven to snatch the infernal things out of the hands of their children, and smash the offending devices into flinders using their bare hands.

Perhaps because it’s getting to be nigh-impossible to find any bauble that isn’t controlled by a chipset, uncounted battery-powered toys will invariably find their way underneath the Christmas tree of every parent. Whether the senders choose to purchase them out of rancor, or merely because they’re just phoning it in and grabbing the first undamaged toy they find, I don’t know. Since nothing is a faster Christmas buzzkill for kids than a toy that doesn’t work, parents quickly learn to stock up on batteries to feed these plastic yuletide monsters.

Over the last couple of years, it seemed clear to me that the venerable nine-volt battery, long a staple of toys and handheld devices since I was a boy, had finally been supplanted by the AA battery. Nothing we recieved from well-meaning relatives used the boxy little energy sources. Accordingly, I purchased a large quantity of AA batteries, and began drinking heavily to try and preemptively kill the pain. Smart move, I thought.

The toymakers, however, had forseen my feeble attempts to keep up with their advances. Meting out strepitous injustice to innocent parents is not enough for these diabolical fiends. No, every single electronic toy we were sent this year required nine-volt batteries. The same kind of batteries I was sure had been discontinued by toymakers. The kind of batteries I didn’t have. Toy after toy was ripped from its packaging in savage, gleeful abandon by tiny hands, and handed to me, where, upon examination, I had to tell their anxious new owners that no, they couldn’t play with them today, because we had no batteries. In an instant, I went from sainted purveyor of holiday bliss to unwitting Grinch. For want of a battery, Christmas was looking lost.

Ultimately, two things saved my sorry ass. The first was nap time for the three-year-old, who, by noon, was increasingly irritable for no discernable reason, and generally making everybody homicidal. The second was a small package of two precious nine-volt batteries from my aunt Lisa, which went undiscovered under the morass of shredded wrapping paper, ribbon, and packing material until I stepped on it with bare feet. It’s remarkable how sharp the edges of modern plastic packages feel. Howling with pain, but detecting none of the geyser of blood I was sure would soon issue forth from my ruptured sole, I found the batteries. Sweet, sweet batteries.

I spent the rest of the day moving the batteries from toy to toy with the aid of a jeweler’s screwdriver, since our six-year-old was neither expected nor able to constrain himself to playing with any single new plaything. Still, Christmas was saved. Thank you, Lisa.

For next Christmas, I plan on buying a dozen batteries of every type sold in North America, just to be on the safe side. Watch batteries? Check. D cells? Got it. If somebody is selling it, I’ll buy it. If nothing else, I’ll be able to distract myself from all the racket by touching lantern batteries to my tongue once the eggnog runs out.