’Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale;
’Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man’s heart through half the year. – Sir Walter Scott

The American trifecta of calorie-infused holidays has almost reached its final leg. From costumes and piles of Halloween candy to Thanksgiving turkey and oceans of gravy we move to the more internationally celebrated Christmas season. You can’t blame Christmas gluttony on Americans, who have only attempted to perfect it. German lebkuchen and Dutch pepernoten aren’t exactly health foods.

After the sugar coma come the gifts, at least if you’ve been good all year. This quasi-moralistic naughty/nice element of Christmas gift-giving has always intrigued me. Parents can keep their children in line by threatening them with a lump of coal from Santa if they don’t clean their rooms. This carrot/stick scenario segues smoothly into the Heaven/Hell storyline of many popular religions as kids grow up.

“Christmas list” has to be one of the crassest terms in all vocabulary, meaning as it does a list of gifts you’d like to receive from friends and family. If they don’t know you well enough to get you something you’ll like on their own, they probably shouldn’t be getting you’re a present in the first place. I feel much the same way about wedding registries, so I’m going to be in deep trouble with any wife and children that may be in my future.

That’s not to say I’m not crass enough to make a list for Santa anyway, especially when it’s a chess list. And since we’ve all been very good this year there should be no problem getting all this stuff, right? I’ll make sure to put out an extra-large stocking and a plate of cookies for Santa just in case.

All I want for Christmas...

1. A unified world chess champion. Yes, I know I asked for this last year and the year before that. Maybe Kramnik was too tall to fit into Santa’s bag? Things don’t look good for a resolution in 2004. Despite periodic rumors about a Kramnik-Leko match, hearing the classical champ say three years is no big deal because Kasparov waited five does not inspire confidence. You’d think Peter Leko wouldn’t be too happy to hear those five-year comments, but he hasn’t been heard from at all.

FIDE has gone silent since announcing KO qualifiers in 2004 in Tripoli, Libya and Baku, Azerbaijan with the winner to play Kasparov for the FIDE title. Sounds better than nothing but I won’t believe it until I see these vaporous events listed on the FIDE calendar. My cheery holiday optimism is not in any way dented by the fact that said calendar still lists “World Chess Championship Unification Match – Venue to be announced” for November, 2003. They can change that to “Venue: Hell – Date: cold day”

The line currently making the rounds, and one I first heard from Kasparov himself in November, is that the reason he’s seeded into the final is that as half-Jewish he can’t go to Libya and as half-Armenian he can’t go to Baku!

2. Responsible leadership in FIDE. Corporate sponsorship, fiscal and political transparency, respect for the member organizations and players, politicians who will represent instead of bully… Hmm, is this a Christmas list or an eggnog overdose fantasy? I guess there’s no way we've been good enough to deserve all this.

Might FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov be capable of such reform? If not, I hear a nice hole near Tikrit just opened up. Plus, he’d look good with a beard.

3. A new cellular telephone for Ruslan Ponomariov. One with a “vibrate” function for those crucial team games. (If he gets one of these we’ll give him Pocket Fritz for free.)

4. A man-machine match with a winner. Call me a traitor but I’m willing to welcome our new computer overlords just to have a decisive result in one of these things. Chess fans understand draws and drawn matches, but even we are getting a little impatient. Then there’s the ESPN crowd, for whom draws of either kind are confusing at best.

Like 99% of chess fans I’ll always root for the human player, no matter how often the programmers say “it’s the human versus the humans behind the program.” On the other hand, genuine improvements in computer chess are always fascinating and deserve a big stage.

Stocking stuffer: Computer programs that don’t use massive opening books. Eliminating them entirely against humans doesn’t seem fair, but there should be limits. As for computer-computer events, using human-created and tuned opening books is bizarre and getting more so every year. Exactly how to enforce a ban on them is another story, but this is a Christmas list, not a legally binding contract.

5. Chocolate-chip cookies. Yeah, I know this is supposed to be a chess list, but I’m making the list and I’m hungry and I want chocolate-chip cookies. With walnuts.

6. More classical supertournaments. Open, closed, swiss, round-robin, KO, I’ll take anything. Despite a steady increase in the number of 2700-rated players, the annual number of games between 2700s hasn’t increased correspondingly. There were actually a few more such classical games in 2002 than in 2003.

Stocking stuffer: More qualifying spots for supertournaments. It adds excitement to the qualifier and the supertournament. Three words: Aeroflot, Dortmund, Bologan. Corus Wijk aan Zee has done this for years. The US Championship has adopted a format in which most of the players qualify from opens and it has added a great deal of new blood and interest.

7. A raise of the minimum rating for the GM title to 2600. Perhaps this is an imperfect solution to the trivializing of the highest title, but it’s also simple and efficient. A title that used to mean world championship contender can now mean you are a full category below the elite. Over 80% of GMs are under 2600 most of them will never hit that plateau. Sure, you have to start somewhere, but if one player is statistically expected to beat another three out of four, they shouldn’t have the same lifetime title.

8. Some video games, comic books, and a trip to Disney World for Sergey Karjakin and Katerina Lahno. As chess wunderkinder are more kinder every year you really wonder about how they are going to come out. Some former chess prodigies have turned out to be very well-adjusted adults, others have been spoiled brats. On the other hand, we have similar cases in other sports and in the entertainment industry and they came out just fine. Wait, Michael Jackson did what?!

Lahno turns 14 in a few weeks, Karjakin will be the same age in January. The Ukrainian teenagers will be front page news before they stop growing. Lahno will start Hastings on her birthday. She needs around a dozen points to become the second-highest rated woman in the world, although India’s Koneru Humpy should provide competition in this dubious, and, one hopes, increasingly irrelevant, category.

Perhaps with these two girls following Judit Polgar’s lead we are a generation away from dropping the anachronistic talk of women’s this and women’s that in chess.

9. More activism from us, the fans. Your local paper doesn’t have a chess column? Write a letter, send an e-mail, make some suggestions. ESPN recently showed chess live on TV. Watching is good; writing them with positive feedback can’t hurt.

Another great thing you can do is teach other people to play. You don’t have to start a school or volunteer to work with a class. Teach a friend or a niece or anyone at all. It’s fun for both of you and only takes a few minutes. Hey, if everyone who knew how to play taught three or four people per year the entire planet would know how to play in a few years. Ah, the wonders of geometric progression.

10. This Space For Rent. Send in YOUR chess Christmas list for Part 2. I’ll include a few GM wish lists as well. A chess set with pieces that never hang? A clock that always gives you those last critical seconds to make the time control? An invisible Grandmaster to whisper in your ear while you play? Send me your want list, realistic or not. We’ll leave it up to Santa to decide whether you deserve the loot, so clean your room.

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Who is Mig? / ChessCafe interview (pdf format) / Recent articles: Kasparov's Book of Matches • Where did the match go? • P-Oh-Noooo • Chess on TV, or not TV? • More Mig...

Mig Greengard runs the chess training and message board site ChessNinja.com, writes a monthly column on ChessBase software, and leaves out grass for the reindeer. E-mail Mig