Brad Paisley is known as one of the best guitar players in the music industry today, but he wasn’t completely thrilled when he got his first guitar.

When he was a kid, Brad remembers not being happy when his grandfather’s Christmas present to him was a guitar, “For me, at eight years old, it was, you know, the Millennium Falcon or Battlestar Galactica or something. It wasn’t a guitar. I knew I was getting a guitar ’cause he had told me he was gonna do that, but, you know, I was not that excited about it.”

Brad also shares the time he tried to catch Santa in the act, “One year I tried to figure out — it was third or fourth grade — I was startin’ to get the hint that maybe there wasn’t a Santa Claus…which there is, by the way. But I wanted to prove it once and for all, so I stuck a tape recorder, pressed record, stuck it behind the Christmas tree, and left it on hoping that I would hear whoever was gonna place those presents there…and I forgot to plug it in.”

Of course for the presents Santa doesn’t cover these days, Brad heads out to get some gifts. While he admits that he’s a last minute Christmas shopper, he doesn’t think he’s alone, “I’m pretty last-minute. Most guys are, I think, are like me. You just don’t invest enough, you don’t think ahead and plan it. I really do end up somewhere like the mall or something on the 24th. It’s a shame. It’s really a waste of what should be a fun day, ’cause you know, here I am scrambling around going, ‘Oh, I think they’ll like that.’ They may have never heard of it, and I don’t know what it is necessarily, but let’s buy it!”

Spreading the holiday cheer this year, Brad took sometime to record himself reading an Elf on the Shelf Christmas story, which you can check out here…

Photo Credit: Jeff Lipsky