Once upon a time, I knew my role and appreciated the division of labor that went into the annual drama that was the Smith family Christmas.

It was the Lovely Mrs.

Smith’s responsibility to discover what the children wanted for Christmas. It also was her responsibility to find it, buy it, transport it, hide it and, if need be, wrap it.

My job was simple. I was to assemble it.

All right, now, for those of you I can already hear clucking, I don’t want to hear it unless you’ve actually had to put together a life-size Barbie Dream Kitchen, complete with fully-functional radar range and wet bar, held together by metric and not standard fasteners (a fact you discover long after any place that sells metric tools is closed). And I don’t want to hear it unless you’ve had to do this by the light of a partially lit Christmas tree in complete silence (even after you rip open a knuckle trying to tighten a screw with an adjustable wrench, which you technically can’t do) for fear of waking either the children or the dog, who would promptly wake the children.

Suffce it to say, on more than one occasion, theLovely Mrs. Smith got the better end of the stick. And it wasn’t even close.

Over the last few years, Christmas at the Smith house has been making a not-particularly-subtle transition away from creations from the fevered minds of the folks at Disney and their ilk to creations from the fevered minds of the folks at Apple and their ilk.

All of which means my role in this entire drama has begun to shrink even further. Because if there is a single phrase that’s even more terrifying than “Some Assembly Required,” it’s “Instructions for downloading your new … .”

Making matters worse is some of these presents aren’t just for the progeny.

The Lovely Mrs. Smith and I have been making a concerted eftort to become more tech-savvy over the last few years, which means we now have phones we can’t necessarily answer,but from which we can apparently launch the space shuttle.

That sort of explains how excited I am to get socks and underwear, since I actually know how to use those, and the directions consist of “don’t wash these with the Santa outfi t, unless you want pink boxers.”

The only saving grace for all of this is I can now consult with my in-house IT department. This consists of tossing any new device to whichever of the progeny is sitting on my sofa and saying “it’s time to earn your keep.” This is not exactly the same process I follow when consulting the IT department at work, which probably explains why there is signifi cantly less eye-rolling involved.

However, since I’m seldom face-to-face with my off ce IT department, I can’t really be sure of that. I mean, seriously, I thought there was a key marked “any.”

So this Christmas found me once again staring at my oldest son with the same vacant, slack-jawed expression he used to display when I mentioned how a lawnmower operates or the concept of trash removal and how it depends on actually getting cans to the curb before the trash truck comes. This time, however, he was tryingto explain to me how we needed to name the device and make sure we were in the right mode before scanning delivery systems for the movie we wanted.

And it found him sighing loudly when I questioned whether “Hulu” should have “Hoop” in back of it.

Not to say I haven’t, over time, had a few moments when mastery of the Old Ways came in handy. For instance, this year, for some reason the Lovely Mrs. Smith wanted an actual, vinyl record player, complete with scratches, pops and the occasional skip. She and I were the only people in the house who knew the dift erence between 45 and 33 1/3 wasn’t 11 2/3.

And a few years back, my youngest came downstairs after we had installed some new techno TV gizmo that gave us access to more channels than there actually were and mentioned he was watching this funny show that was in black and white, but had this sherift and his deputy who was really nervous, and who only got one bullet at a time.

That’s when I realized;

whatever the technological advancement, Andy transcends.

GARY SMITH IS A RECOVERING JOURNALIST LIVING IN ROGERS.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 01/02/2014