Christmas Eve came and went in a flurry of activity. It had taken Sammy and Blaine all of a single hour to decide that they were now best friends and would not be separated for any reason. Grand smiles were plastered on both the Oak and Rogers families as the boys talked and laughed as boys tend to do. Silly jokes, tales of their respective adventures at school, what their favorite radio shows were (The Red Rhydon was obviously the best), and mostly polite arguments over which Pokemon could beat each other in a fight. The heated discussions lasted well through dinner and had thoroughly overtaken the childrens’ table. Even when Sammy’s Grandfather announced that he had something to show everyone, both boys continued to whisper animatedly with each other until a firm hand on each shoulder from Dean silenced them.

It was then that the large box was ripped open. Boards were pried back and cheers of excitement erupted with each one that got tossed into a nearby pile. Finally, the entire front panel was removed and styrofoam peanuts poured out to reveal… something. At first glance it appeared to be a medium-sized cabinet, but the lack of drawers or shelves were confusing. A gray box with rounded edges took up most of the space and was covered in glass. Two large dials protruded from its right side and several additional smaller dials lay just below them. To its left was a mesh of some sort.

Murmurs broke out and Sally clapped both of her hands across her mouth in shock. Sammy looked around in confusion and had been surprised to see Blaine’s eyes widen as he turned from the box to Sammy and back again. Blaine whispered something under his breath, but Sammy couldn’t hear it over his Grandfather’s attempts to calm the crowd.

“Now, now folks, I bet most of you have no idea what this thing is and for those of you who do I reckon that you can keep mum about it for a few minutes while I explain.” Roger Oak’s hands were spread wide as two men Sammy hadn’t noticed before cleared away the packing material and boards. “My good friend Mister Dean here had alerted me that a new antenna had been installed up in Pewter and Viridian and that it was one of them new-fangled doodads that the League had been putting up in places like Celadon. What’s the word…” Roger looked over askantly at Dean.

The Trainer chuckled. “Analog Broadcast Towers.”

“That’s the ticket! Analog Broadcast! And now that we’re all set…” The same men who had cleared away the box had now plugged the cabinet and had stepped back with a bow. “Behold! Television!”

With a twist of his wrist, Sammy’s Grandfather turned the cabinet on. A loud rushing sound careened from the grill on the cabinet…no, the television’s front. It hissed and sputtered while emitting pops and crackles that made many in attendance cover their ears and recoil physically. With a shout both of the men who had unboxed and plugged in the machine rushed to assist Roger with the smaller dials. Both of their backs were emblazoned with a bold logo of what looked like half a Pokeball and the words “Cannon Company”, clearly representatives of the same company that had delivered the tree earlier in the day. As the men fiddled with the dials, the horrific static slowly dissipated as it was interspersed with snippets of sound and music. Sammy looked on in wild wonder as the glass panel changed from displaying a fuzzy mosaic of black and white dots to what looked like a stage filled with musicians and a singer. As the picture came more and more into focus, so did the sound.

Sammy recognized the tune, he had heard it on the radio several times.

Whisper to me, tell me do you love me true

Or is he holding you the way I do?

Though love is blind, make up your mind, I've got to know

Should I hang up or will you tell him, he'll have to go?

He didn’t know when he had sank to the floor, but the soft glow from the television cabinet had utterly entranced him. The idea, the very concept of being able to see the man on the radio was so completely foreign that Sammy had no other option than to just let his mind go blank. Once the song ended and the room applauded along with the television audience Sammy took a moment to glance around and see what everyone else’s reactions were like. Most of the adults were a mixture of adulation and inquisitiveness (mostly wondering how much Sammy’ Grandfather had spent on the contraption), while the few kids in attendance were all gazing in rapture at the screen. The singer’s red suit and black bowtie were displayed in such clarity that Sammy wondered if it wasn’t for the glass in the way, he could reach in and just grab them. Blaine, however, looked smug.

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“That was mister Jim Reeves. He’s mom’s favorite singer right now. She said that this was her favorite song of his so far too.” A slender finger pushed the massive lenses higher up the boy’s face. “I think it just came out this year, but Dad says that he didn’t write the song himself or even was the first one to sing it!”

Sammy’s look was all skepticism. “Huh? But you said it just came out this year?”

“Yeah, sure, but Dad says that a lot of these famous singers don’t actually write their own stuff and then some of them actually will just sing someone else’s song in just a tiny different way and people think it’s better than the original way so the singer is the one who gets popular even though they didn’t actually write the song to begin with!”

It was a wonder how Blaine could smoosh together a bunch of sentences in a single breath like he did, but Sammy was getting used to it quickly. The trick, he found, was to wait until Blaine took a breath and quickly get in a word edgewise before he kept on going. In reality, the boy had mostly been the one talking all night. Sammy was alright with that as he preferred to listen. That was how the rest of the evening went. Blaine would talk and Sammy would listen. Even as Dean and his Grandfather hauled up the trundle bed to Sammy’s room and stifled curses as the springs nearly caused the whole thing to fold in half on their hands, Blaine kept on chattering new “trivia” about random things that he liked. It wasn’t until Crescent scampered out from under the bed scared at the sudden new noises that Blaine stopped in a shocked stare of his own.

“You’ve got your own Nidoran?!” He gaped. “Really? That’s so cool! Did you know that their ears can home in on the tiniest sounds? They’ve got these really cool muscles in their head that let them move them all around sorta like big old cups and the horn on their heads is not actually made of bone and their front teeth don’t stop growing until they evolve into a Nidorino and I’m so jealous, how come you get to have your own Pokemon? My dad said that I’m too young but at least he lets me play with Rooster and-”

“Okay, okay, Blaine, calm down, we’ve gone over this, haven’t we?” Dean gestured placatingly at the boy whose rapid-fire tongue was rising in both pitch and volume. “Sammy’s a bit of a special case seeing as he rescued Crescent. You don’t get to have one until you’ve got at least a couple of merit badges in the Youngsters. That’s the rules, kid. Now I don’t want you keeping Sammy up all night with your yapping. Besides, Santa won’t come unless you’re sleeping. Don’t want to miss out on presents, now, do you?”

Blaine clamped his mouth shut and drew his fingers across his lips in a mock approximation of sealing them shut with a zipper before throwing himself onto the trundle bed and burying himself under the covers. With a chuckle, Dean ruffled the boy’s head above the blankets and waved goodbye to Sammy as he stepped out of the room. Roger winked at his grandson and departed much the same way, leaving the door open and the light in the hallway on.

Sammy sighed as he burrowed into his own blankets and twisted about until he found a comfortable spot where Crescent’s head-horn wasn’t poking into his calf. Beyond the odd tidbits that he had learned from Blaine over the course of the evening, Sammy couldn’t help but wonder at what was in the box that Dean had placed under the tree. It had a tag with Sammy’s name on it, but he just couldn’t think of what the man could have possibly gotten him. Worse yet, he couldn’t really grasp why Dean would have gotten him anything. He kept mulling it over in his head even as tiny, muffled snores came from the trundle bed.

It didn’t seem very long before Sammy found himself dreaming. He knew it had to be a dream because he was standing on a wide stage just like the man on the television. An entire crowd of people were looking at him expectantly, but Sammy wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do. As he stood there getting more and more nervous by the second, Sammy looked around the stage to see Crescent standing on his hind legs and balancing a ball on his nose. Grateful for the distraction, Sammy just pointed at the Nidoran with both hands as the crowd began to cheer for the balancing act. As a final showstopper, Crescent pushed the ball into the air and jumped. The audience and Sammy held their breath in anticipation as both ball and Pokemon traveled higher and higher into the air. With a mighty chirrup, Crescent kicked the ball…

right into Sammy’s face.

His eyes flew open and Sammy nearly startled out of bed, but the heavy weight of Crescent’s stomach was pressing down on his chin as the Nidoran spread himself like a purple scarf over the boy’s neck. Grunting in annoyance, Sammy pulled Crescent down into his arms and held him much like he used to hold his old stuffies back at his old house. The Pokemon hardly fussed at all and simply squirmed in closer. Sammy blinked back a yawn.

He blinked his eyes open again as the soft red glow of the dawn poured into the room and Blaine practically erupted from his bed and shot off down the hall crying out for the whole house to hear.

“It’s Christmas! Time to open presents!”