Your wife may finally love you when she unwraps this impeccably packaged OM-36 on Christmas Day! That is, if she hasn’t had too many mimosas by then… When she drinks too much, she gets that look in her eyes - unbridled, honest. Some terrifying truth is lurking beneath her eyes (how long, then, has she felt this way?) and, clicking her tongue in calculated beauty (how long?) she sees what monstrously mis-guided gift, junk, some bauble of un-lovable, wishful thinking you have gifted her for Christmas. She knows that she will hold nothing back, give you no quarter. Your children in sullen states sink into the couch cushions. “An Omnichord? You thought that I wanted an Omnichord?” She savors the look of downfallen horror on your face. How long, Martha? How long have I let you down — was it always like this, and simply too foolish to see?

“How dreadful you are, in your complacent normalcy. How undeserving you are in your lack of interest - filling our lives with detritus in some vague attempt at rekindling passion. Another Christmas, ruined.” Your children burst into tears. They flock to their stockings but there is nothing, no gift. The Christmas fire has grown dim, dim, then gone — and their stockings full of only dark and greasy coal. You collapse at Martha’s knees, hugging her in vain, begging her.

“Martha, forgive me!”

When you tear your face from her legs and look upwards, however, there is no Martha; your wife has been transfigured, in some terrible and guttural fashion. The Belsnickel is here! He tosses you aside like some lousy Christmas item that is lousy and has no power. Maybe a wet kitchen rag or an old gherkin. Your children, cowering before the mantel, find no escape, and he raises his birch branches to strike them.

“It was your fault — all your fault! This was a miserable gift idea, this Suzuki Omnichord OM-36 In Original Box and with Original Overlays and Booklets was never meant to be given — she would have never appreciated it, she would have never appreciated its extraordinary condition and fine price! And as it is you have given such a gift under a shameful ignorance of the self, you must be made known to thyself — made to see the pity of your condition under subjugation and suffering. ‘Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls,’ yet it remains to be seen if you have the integrity to endure this Dark Night of the Soul. La noche oscura del alma, can you dig it? It is a very selfish thing to reject a gift - and much more selfish to give to another that which one simply wanted to receive.”

As the whistling crack of the Belsnickel’s birch branches thunder around the room, punctuated by your children’s begging for relief, you realize your children are not there, no - it is you beneath the punishing arm of the Belsnickels. How long, Martha? How long?

“Under such dubious circumstances I shall give you simply what you deserve this year — Herr Klaus has revealed your naughtiness and you shan’t even a brick of coal be-get. To be Job in the dirt; to be in the ashes and scrawling oneself with the broken urns of your forefathers, that is what you deserve and the gate by which you must re-discover thyself. So it is said: ‘O, Woe Unto you, the uninspected soul / to grope along and never be whole / and grown in lonely withering / do exact unto others your self-wrought toll.’

Oh, what a hoot that would be! It likely won’t happen. This Omnichord is in great condition — comes in its original box with original power supply and manual. Befitting of a real appreciator of collector-grade stuff. This unit works with batteries.