Beyond the usual modest slate of individual gifts, our household traditionally also manages to find a collective gift for the whole family to enjoy; it’s a nice little reward for getting ourselves through the year. This year, rather than grabbing some large entertainment purchase (We’ll wait a while on a next-gen console, for example), we found a decent collective experience that we could all enjoy.

Thus, last night, we caught the local exhibition of the Mythbusters “Behind the Myths” tour, featuring intrepid television hosts and STEM advocates Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman live on stage, answering questions, demonstrating clever scientific principles , and generally being entertaining.

Certainly entertaining enough to keep my kids occupied for two hours, even if they didn’t blow anything up on stage.

Adam did, of course, whack himself in the face with a friction-phone-book climbing rig (by accident), and then there was the 500 rounds per minute paintball cannon business, which helped keep them entranced.

For me, though, the favorite piece of the whole evening was the exuberant enthusiasm for science, experimentation, and making things exhibited by these guys – you could tell they were having a blast up there, and do so every day, having the privilege of doing the jobs they do. When one the audience volunteers (“a female college student without glasses”, which they needed for a particular experiment/gag) turned out to be a civil engineering major at the nearby university, Adam’s genuine pleasure at discovering this fact, and his geeking out about engineering with her for a few moments before the bit isn’t something you can fake. Adam, Jamie, and everybody involved with this production, and the Mythbusters television show in general are wonderful and admirable, offering something we don’t get enough of in mainstream American culture, especially “reality” television.

These guys make learning about science and engineering fun and pleasurable, because they genuinely love it, and believe in the value of education, and exploring and learning about the world. They’re a great example to emulate, and for that reason, I was more than happy to drag the whole family into the city to brave traffic and crowds in order to expose them to it.

That the whole thing was a thoroughly entertaining experience was merely a bonus.