In the wake of my disastrous shopping spree and with Christmas only two weeks away, I turned to the one person in the universe who I still believed could right practically any wrong (and the only person, besides mustachioed TV magician Doug Henning, who could make genuine magic happen): Santa Claus. I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote Santa a detailed, irony-free missive that was no less than seven single-spaced pages in length, describing what had befallen me at the department store on the previous Saturday morning. Though I harbored some doubts about Santa’s existence, as any discerning 12-year-old should, my letter was still earnest and heart-felt and easily the best thing I had ever written up to that point in my life.

The whole point of the letter, of course, was to squeeze Santa for a Machine Code Monitor cartridge for the VIC-20. When I was finished, I folded it up, drew some reindeer on the envelope, then pestered my mother into mailing it to the North Pole. She informed me that it was probably going to be tough for Santa to accomodate a last-minute request like this. “Besides, didn’t you already tell him what you wanted?” she asked.

She was right. My brother and I had visited Santa Claus at a J.C. Penny store a couple of weeks earlier. I’d sat on his bony knee. His breath smelled of tomato soup. “My, you’re a big one, aren’t you? Ho, ho, ho!” Santa had said, clearly remarking on the awkward growth spurt I’d recently endured.

I had asked him for a wood-burning kit, an arts-and-crafts toy that featured a wand which you plugged into an electrical outlet, and which heated up to a point where it was eventually hot enough to be used as a crude pen to burn crude designs into soft wood. (This particular kit would ultimately be responsible for burning a series of houses to the ground.) “We’ll see, ho, ho, ho!” the Santa had said. The visit had only made me more suspicious. (“Well, he’s not the real Santa,” my mother had tried to explain after the visit, “but only one of Santa’s helpers.” As we all know, this is the final line of defense for parents when the Santa Claus myth is running on fumes.)

My parents were always poor, yet somehow, someway they always managed to pull out all the stops on Christmas morning. (I’d come to appreciate in later years my mother’s ability to clip coupons and cut corners. And she always kept a Christmas Club, a special type of savings account which she started socking money into as soon as the previous Christmas was over.) As usual, we opened our gifts one at a time, always going from youngest (my brother) to the oldest (my father). When I opened my wood-burning kit, I tried my best to smile and feign joy, but must have failed miserably. “But isn’t that what you wanted?” my mother asked.

I told her it was. I opened the kit, plugged the wand into an electrical outlet and promptly burned myself, leaving a dime-sized welt on my index finger. Instead of a game-making computer programmer, I resigned myself to my future as the town’s wood-burner—”festive wood-burnings for all occasions” my ad in the Yellow Pages would say.

As we cleaned up the stray wads of wrapping paper, my mother lifted one of the pillows off a nearby armchair and said, “What’s this? Is this a present that Santa forgot to put underneath the tree?” This forgotten present was approximately the size and shape of the Machine Code Monitor cartridge. The tag on the outside said, “To: Scott, From: Santa,” but the handwriting, I noticed, was my mother’s distinctively flowery cursive. I tore the wrapping paper free. It was—glory be—the VIC-20 Machine Code Monitor cartridge.

As I sprinted down the hallway to the bathroom, a bout of diarrhea suddenly coming on, my father said, “I suppose that means he likes it.”

Now, let’s talk about stage 8-12. I began this stage with 25 Marios and finished with a mere nine—yes, nine—which should give you some indication of what you can expect out there today. This is one of those stages that requires a little bit of Donkey Kong intuition (D.K.I.) and a lot of luck in order to complete it.

This Mario-eating gauntlet is spread out across two horizontally stacked screens of gameplay, with Mario at the very bottom and Donkey Kong and Pauline at the very top. In between both parties is a series of relatively tiny platforms, a large percentage of which are of the shimmy-a-little-then-drop-out-beneath-your-feet variety, a.k.a. “vanishers.” From his perch, Donkey Kong is hurling boulders at an almost alarming rate. These things fall so fast that it’s nearly impossible to get out of their way. The best that you can hope for is that you’re on the right platform at the right time when the next boulder comes sailing by.

Because of the positioning of the platforms, there is really only one path you can take to the top. Head to the right, then back to the left, then to the right again, in a kind of reverse-Z pattern. The key is knowing when to stop and wait to let another “boulder storm” pass before moving on. Pro Tip: If you feel you should move, move. Trust your own D.K.I. at this point. After 87 stages, your D.K.I. should be fairly well-developed.

By far the most frustrating aspect of today’s stage is the last little bit. Once you’ve reached the top, you’ll need to perch yourself on a single solid block just to the right of Donkey Kong’s nest area. He’ll continue to release boulders in the same exact way until he suddenly fouls one off like a batter in baseball. This rogue boulder with bounce up and back to the left after it leaves his hands, then begin its descent. When you spot D.K. fouling one off like this, that’s your cue to make a run for Pauline.

If your timing is right, you’ll reach the ladder as Donkey Kong is tossing a follow-up boulder. (The boulder should pass just beneath your feet.) Give Pauline a brief kiss, inform her that you’ve only got 13 more stages to go before the two of you can finally take that vacation at the Sandals resort, then watch as D.K. hauls her away.

Final numbers for this section of the game:

Stage 8-9: 134 seconds

Stage 8-10: 181 seconds

Stage 8-11: 21 seconds

Stage 8-12: 114 seconds

Grand total: 450 seconds. Number of Marios remaining: 14 (after my bonus Marios were awarded at the end of this series of stages). List of things to do today: go to the bank; pick up milk; harvest Marios.