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Stafford: Best Gift Ever

It wasn't the Nintendo video game console my brother and I received in 1988. It wasn't the sweet Starter jacket in 1991. It wasn't even the shiny BMX bike sitting in the driveway, red bow on the handlebars, on Christmas Day 1992. No, the best Christmas gift I ever received was perched under the tree when I was 14 years old in 1995: a black and white electric guitar.

We always had acoustic guitars around the house. I picked them up from time to time but never mustered enough interest to learn more than a few chords. But this. This was an electric guitar. Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, The Beatles -- all the music storming my consciousness as a young teenager was driven by this one amplified instrument.

Within a few months I learned all the basic chords and could strum a handful of Nirvana songs. My best friend eventually saved up enough money to buy a drum kit. You can guess what happened next. We quickly found two other kids in our class that played guitar and bass and a rock band was formed.

I won’t lie. In those early months we lacked instrumental competency. But that didn’t stop us from immediately booking gigs around town. Our first show was at an elementary school ice cream social, and we only knew 3 Beatles songs. But it didn’t matter, we had a blast up there on stage. The audience asked to play our same 3 songs over and over.

And that is why that cheap electric guitar was the best Christmas gift I ever received. It was way more than a musical instrument. It was a confidence builder. Those early gigs in cramped church basements and house parties were my first experience in expressing creativity to an audience. And that fueled me. It gave me the courage to speak up in class, to start writing for my town newspaper and, perhaps most importantly to a 15-year-old male, to talk to girls.

Fast forward to Christmas 2014. I have a beautiful wife and 2 awesome little girls. I run a marketing agency in Brattleboro and serve on the Newfane school board, two duties that require a healthy amount of confident decision-making. All told, I think 14-year-old Luke would be pretty stoked on how 33-year-old Luke turned out, even if he's not listening to nearly as much punk rock.

I don’t recall what became of that first guitar. But it’s just an object. What matters is that, even though our band broke up after high school, my former bandmates remain my three best friends to this day. So thank you, electric guitar, for amplifying my first creative expressions into the world. And thanks, Pat, Ben and Ben, for having the courage to stand on those stages with me in our awkward teenage years. And thank you, Mom, for giving me the best Christmas gift I ever received.

Luke Q. Stafford is a writer living in Williamsville, Vermont. He owns Mondo Mediaworks, a video production company based in Brattleboro.
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