Paris Hilton's Christmas List

What do you suppose Paris Hilton wants for Christmas?

I recently read in the New York Post (sometimes I like to go slumming - what can I say?) that the girl who is Famous For Being Famous just wants "... a man to fall in love with, one for life. Someone that I can start a family with."

Of course right around the same time as Paris made this comment, she was running around the clubs of Europe with no underpants and a variety of boy-toys, then posing for a new wine ad wearing nothing but a coat of gold latex and a few paint-roller marks. Sometimes it's hard to take her seriously.

Paris is almost the same age as my son, so I called him up and asked his opinion. "If I woke up on Christmas morning and discovered that I was Paris Hilton, he said, "I'd want handgun. And one bullet. And instructions covering which end of the gun to put up against my head." Apparently he's not a real big Paris Hilton fan.

I guess nobody else I asked was a big fan either, since they all had pretty much the same answer - except for one person who said she would want an extra bullet "as a kindness to that creepy little dog."

So what exactly do you wrap up under the tree for a girl who gets paid $50,000 (plus an extra $10,000 for not wearing any underpants) just to show up at a bar mitzvah?

Of course there are the usual ultra-expensive gifts - things like toothpicks made from mastodon ivory, or diamond-encrusted iPhones - but I'd be surprised if our little Paris didn't already have most of that stuff. I'd even bet that if you dumped out her $45,000 Vuitton handbag you'd find a tube of Guerlain lipstick, with its solid 18K gold case, 2.5 carats of diamonds, and a price tag of $62,000.

You could go all out and buy Paris a 253 mph Bugatti Veyron automobile for a little over two million dollars, or an 82 foot Bay SonShip Motor Yacht for just under five million, but she'd probably just return them for store credit.

For a bargain $1,764,000 you could book passage for Paris and five of her closest friends into space on the Burt Rutan-designed Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo. The bad news is that the next available flight will be in 2009. That, and they don't offer a one-way option.

I guess, looking at all this from her point of view, Paris might have at least partly meant what she said about wanting someone to start a family with. She would probably find it a pretty nice change of pace to wake up next to a man and know his real name.

Better yet, I'll bet that she would like to wake up next to someone who knows exactly how she liked her coffee. Someone who will endure the frantic way she scrapes her ice cream dish at the end of the ice cream. Someone who thinks it is kind of cute when she snores, and who is grateful that she was willing to put up with him when he does.

Someone who will look at her thirty years from now and, even if she doesn't spend her weight in platinum every year on cosmetic surgery, still see the girl he sees today.

You know, I really hope that Paris eventually does find someone to spend her life with, although it seems to me that she is probably not really looking in the best places to find him. In the meantime - and I think that I think just about everyone will agree with me on this - there is one thing that I would really, really like to see Paris Hilton get for Christmas this year.

Underpants.

Copyright © 2007, Michael Ball

What I've Learned So Far... by Mike Ball is a syndicated feature distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.