While there were many pleasant surprises, I can tell you that I most definitely did not get everything I wanted this year. (Unless one of you kidnapped Tony Stark, left him wearing nothing but a bow, and sneaked him under my tree in the past hour, that is.)

Photo by di_the_huntress

Last time the Obamas tried to get away from it all for a little while was in summer — but then Ted Kennedy went and died and Ben Bernanke was renominated as Fed chairman. He already had to delay the start of this vacation to helicopter over the healthcare bill. Now he and the family — and his aides and military advisors — have taken off he really, really wants to do nothing. From the AP:

White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday that the president wants to spend his holiday in his birthplace away from the news-of-the-moment distractions that have dominated his first year in office. No public events were scheduled and the best any of the president's aides could promise would be bets whether lefty Obama would out-drive his good friends - joining him from Chicago - on the golf course.

Which raises the question, if he's really determined not to do much, as to what are Presidential round-the-house clothes are like. Are there some stained sweatpants with the presidential seal on? Do the Secret Service have to sniffer-dog a 'Vegas or Bust' hoody that someone gave the president as part of an in-joke in 1993? Are there — and this is a question of vital national importance — official Snuggies?

According to the YouTube credits, the script for this tale was a group effort by Comics & Cartoons, a 4chan community, but nevermind the script, I don't think the story would've been the same without the fantastic imitation of Raw Shark. [Thanks, Matt!]

While I know that this video was filmed under controlled conditions, a room set up by researchers with safety measures to keep the fire from spreading, I still can't watch it without glancing over at my own Christmas tree and shivering. [Wired]

Netflix/Gamefly Subscription: Anyone who wouldn't appreciate a year's worth of unlimited game or movie rentals is not someone worth buying a gift for. And the great thing about Netflix/Gamefly is that you can't possibly buy them this subsciption from a physical store. In other words, you won't look lazy when their gift announcement arrives in eCard certificate form. Starting at about $100/year. [Netflix/Gamefly]

Nook: How can you possibly buy someone a Nook for Christmas when it's been delayed until February? Exactly! Order a Nook today and then say, "Sorry, I ordered it for you well before Christmas, but those darned manufacturing delays for this highly anticipated product seemed to have spoiled my plans." $259 [Nook]

iTunes album/movie: In case you wanted to go a bit more personal than an iTunes gift card (and you are too lazy to leave the house to buy one, even though that just means running to the drug store), gift an album straight through the iTunes Store. It's easy, just right click on the buy icon and select the gift option. All you need is an email to send a friend an album. Also, you can always print it out, too. $10ish

Magazine Subscription: Every time I receive a copy of Chicago magazine in the mail, I think about how my mother-in-law kindly gifted it to me. But you know what? She could have ordered that subscription AFTER she handed me a symbolic copy on Christmas morning. Spice things up a bit by buying a magazine that's hard to acquire. My best recommendation? Edge, the best-written, most beautifully laid out gaming magazine in the world. $76 [Edge]

Zune Pass/Last.fm: If you've never used an unlimited music service, you've missed out. It's basically radio on demand without a $1 charge every time you want to listen to a song. And while subscription fees might keep you from buying it for yourself, this is a gift, so the recipient need only enjoy. Zune Pass and Last.fm are both excellent options for unlimited tunage. Zune $15/month Last.fm $3/month Note: I'm fairly certain you can gift Zune Pass online, but didn't go through the whole process. [Zune/Last.fm]

Burned Disc of Torrentz: I wouldn't recommend this for mom or grandma, but for a friend you casually meet over the holidays, why not just burn them a copy of something valuable you...err...procured online. Your favorite music, a movie that hasn't left theaters yet, a bootleg of Windows 7 Ultimate—whatever—just make it something you know they'll like, and be sure to stick a bow on it $$=FREE

Bacon of the Month Club: 12 months. 12 different artisan bacons. Need I say more? $315 [Grateful Palate]

Don't Buy a Star: There are a countless number of stars in the Universe. And you know what? When we're traveling the cosmos, no one plotting star charts is going to acknowledge Mark Rox Bacon 2009 as the official name of some red giant on the verge of engulfing the first intelligent life we encounter. Or, even worse, the star's name will be acknowledged and your love's name will go down in infamy. Smooth move. [Star Registry]

A few years back Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard flipped the bird to their desk jobs, packed their belongings in a custom 17-foot solar-powered fiberglass camper, and hit the road to live "at the intersection of Epic and Awesome." A couple months ago, while staying with friends, they noticed that Amazon was luring RVers to Coffeyville, Kansas, the site of the retail giant's original and largest fulfillment center.

"We were located in San Diego at the time," explained Cherie. "We're part of a community of younger full-time RVers on Nurvers.com, a group of non-retired-age folks who are living the mobile lifestyle and kind of going outside the norms of 'Wait for retirement to travel.'" They noticed other RVers were flocking to Kansas to work for Amazon. The pay wasn't great—just above $10-an-hour, typically—but Chris and Cherie were planning on being in St. Louis for the holidays. Why not kill a month in Kansas working for Amazon?

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and the self-styled "technomads" were putting down stakes at a state park about 20 miles from the four enormous but dull warehouses that comprise the Coffeyville hub.

Their first day inside, Chris was awed. "Walking inside reminded me of the scene from Indiana Jones when they abandon the Ark in that giant warehouse. It's three stories high. It feels like an industrial library. Shelves going up and up and up." Hundreds of employees scurried, some "orange-badges" or "green-badges" hired by two temporary employment services mixed with the sought-after blue-badges of full-time Amazon employees, guided to their next destination by computers that flashed lights when bins were full or guided workers through the maze with handheld computers. "Pickers are basically playing a human Pac-Man game. They've got a computer scanner that they carry around that tells them where to go. They find their little shelf. One slot might be a book. The next shelf over might be a toaster. Or an iPod. The next slot after that might be a pair of jeans."

Fiberglass City

Amazon didn't always lure in "workcampers" from the RV community.

"From what the agency people had told us, Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa," says Chris. "There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren't really serious about the job."

Workers from Tulsa were adding a 4-hour round-trip commute to an already grueling 10-to-12 hour shift, Cherie is quick to add. "They'd get there exhausted."

Enter the workcampers, people making a go at living in their RVs full time—many of whom might be otherwise overqualified. "I think Amazon was skeptical at first," says Cherie. "But after the first trial year they were very, very impressed. Workcampers came in enthusiastic about working, since most are professionals. We've owned businesses or been managers." White collar workers, trying their hand at the gypsy life. Even better, the workcampers were able to stay locally.

Not all of the camps provided for the workcampers were exactly inviting.

Chris and Cherie pulled into the one just before Thanksgiving, but could tell it wouldn't make for a pleasant stay. "The closest one was a city park called Walter Johnson. RVs were very close together. Half the campsites had full hookups, which meant they had water, electricity, and sewer dump on-site. Half the sites just had electricity and water and they had what they call a 'Honey Wagon' that comes around and pumps your sewage out a few times a week." Some RVers had been in Coffeyville since August.

Worse, it was cramped and muddy. "Coffeyville also had a flood three years ago, so it was very, very wet and muddy because the area had been washed out, then rained on recently." They eventually moved on to a state park, which was lovely, but also four times farther away. They rarely had time to enjoy the scenery.

"We were on the night shift," says Chris, "Our day would start when we would wake up at three in the afternoon. Work started at five."

"Every shift starts with what they call a 'Stand Up.' You gather in one area with your usual department—ours was called 'Sortable Singles,' which sounds like it should be the name of a dating site—and they'd count off how many people they needed in each department. Run through a few announcements. Give you a few safety tips. And then they lead you through five minutes of group stretches."

Cherie was mainly a packer, putting items in the box and scanning them. Chris, on the other hand, was a "water spider." He explains, "A water spider is responsible for keeping all the packers supplied, so ideally they'd never need to stand up and leave their station to get any other supplies like all the different sizes of boxes, plus making sure their tape machines and paper-spitter machines are operating."

"I never quite exactly figured out why they call it a water spider. My guess is back in the history of assembly line jobs, the water spider would be the person who would bring people on the line water to drink. Nobody seemed to know!"

The Mocha Factory

Work was monotonous and—for a couple who had been living a relative life of leisure—full of endless hours of standing on one's feet.

"24-Hour Fitness, Amazon-style," laughs Chris. Cherie liked to think of it as having "a personal trainer for 60 hours a week."

Inside the warehouses, machines and man alike were controlled by Amazon's computerized assembly line.

In one part of the factory, Chris watched two giant elliptical carousels, each one the size of a football field, carry wooden trays around at 15mph. "All the items are coming in the totes on one side of this giant machine. There are people who take each individual item, scan them and put them on the trays as they go by. The trays get to a chute where their order is being assembled, tilt, and the product flies down into that space. When all the items for a particular order are assembled in one place an orange light comes on and somebody comes by." Above, another carousel brought an endless procession of empty boxes to be filled with the orders.

It wasn't exactly what Cherie had envisioned. "When we told people were going to do this, someone said 'Whenever I click the order button on Amazon, I always imagine a chorus of happy, singing Oompa-Loompas riding around on Segways and shipping my stuff.' Well...no. It's not exactly like that."

"The computer has to prioritize how it's going to send out all the pickers in this giant facility. So someone could order a book and a sweater and an iPod, and those could be in completely different corners of the whole facility. But somehow they all arrive within about 30 minutes of each other." It's efficiency even Willy Wonka could love.

Chris and Cherie wouldn't work another season at Coffeyville, but not because they were miserable. "Everybody treated each other really nicely!" says Chris. It's just that the two are "experience junkies, craving the new," even if working for Amazon certainly gave them a fresh perspective on American culture.

"You'd have a tote come down the line, and you'd have adult toys right next to kid toys in the same bin," laughs Cherie. "The Obama Chia Pet was an oddity. And the Bill Clinton corkscrew. And I did have a tote one afternoon that was full of mooning gnomes."

Chris geeked on it pretty hard. (Before he became an migrant worker, Chris was a founding editor for boot magazine—later known as Maximum PC. He also worked for Palm.) "Just getting to experience that type of work, to literally see consumer culture flow beneath your fingertips, was absolutely fascinating. You feel the pulse of the market."

Besides their paychecks, all they're left with are memories—cameras weren't allowed inside.

"One of the rules at Amazon is that you're not allowed to bring anything into the facility that they sell." Chris went through a bit of withdrawal. "One of the hardest things about the job was going without my iPhone for a month. It was a great way to break the addiction of wanting to Twitter about things. You'd be like, 'Oh my God, I just saw this Bill Clinton corkscrew and you won't believe where the corkscrew comes out.' But oh crap, I can't tweet."

This week's Shooting Challenge? Inappropriate Holiday Browsing.

For inspiration, look at the results of our last inappropriate browsing contest (warning, some NSFW images). The shot need not include Gizmodo, but someone should be online, ruining the holiday cheer.

The rules:

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the "challenge" part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com.
5. Include 800px image AND something wallpaper sized in email.

Send your best entries by Sunday at 6PM Eastern to contests@gizmodo.com with "Inappropriate Holiday Browsing" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs at 800 pixels wide, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email.

I will admit that the bottom is pretty badass looking, and it certainly does leave a lot of room for presents. But you need to have a home setup similar to this to pull it off, and you also need to be cool with your tree dangling from a wire hung from a crane-like apparatus.

But really, if it were my dad who did this, I would tell him to quit fiddling with the tree and to reroute that energy to my presents. That's the reason for the season, after all. [Instructables]

It's a Christmas tree PC!

For those who were hoping it would be a less festive, our apologies for not revealing a burning Santa effigy PC post-jump. [bit-tech via TechEBlog]

This isn't the first time that Terren has made a Tesla coil Christmas tree, nor do I think it will be the last. He uses slow exposure photography to capture these incredible image, taking about two minutes for each of the shots. You can check out his site for some behind-the-scenes pictures of how he arranged the project and the safety measures he took while working with this coil.

In the meantime, I'll just be here ooh-ing and aaahh-ing for a while. [Tesla Down Under via Neatorama via Make]

He asked the kids what they wanted for Christmas but seemed surprised by their expensive and high-tech tastes, including iPods, cell phones and video games.

"Whatever happened to, like, asking for a bike?" POTUS asked. "Everbody has a bike," one informed him and others agreed.

From the mouths of babes: Gadgetry beats lo-fi, analog "bi-cycles" any day. [Gawker, image source]

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Xmas Wishes in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!