Santa hit this one out of the park!
SonofV exclaimed "My wish came true!!" and he carried that guitar around *all day*. He's not accustomed to being four feet wide and consequently smacked the headstock into doorframes, lamps and the dvd player knocking the disc askew and shoving the tray halfway in... no lasting damage, thankfully.
Turns out he got two guitars this year. MrsV didn't take back the acoustic after all, and it's a decent little guitar. Steel strings, and a small sized body/neck. One of the guitar uncles tuned it and played a few licks on it. It sounded just fine.
SonofV rocked out all day. The biggest problem was finding an outlet to plug the amp into. But when he couldn't find one, he still played. He got an AFI concert dvd too, and played that to death. Late in the day he called me into the room and said "Dad, listen. <AFI guitarist licks> <SonofV thrashing> I can do that part!" Hehehe. Not a question, a statement. It was great.
He got a very complete rig, axe, amp, fx box incl tuner, cables, bag o' picks, extra strings, gig bag and separate bag for accessories, headphones, stand. Now come the lessons. I have the card for a local teacher of electric guitar, but we haven't met yet. I think I'd like to get him something that he can play over and over on the tv, like an introductory instructional guitar video, at least to supplement the once weekly lessons. I may post some "concert footage" at some point.
I have to say thanks to Rob at
Guitar Emporium. That's him on the left in the picture at the link. Really strictly an acoustic shop, he seemed very knowledgeable and very willing to help a clueless shopper, such as myself. He called down to the "competition" described earlier, and I brought the electric guitar back to his shop. I had discovered I hadn't gotten a strap, or a second cable to permit the use of the fx box. He offered to take a look at the guitar.
The first thing he did was sight along the neck and point out to me the swayback contour of the neck. Ick. A couple of turns on the truss rod nut (who knew?) brought back to true. He showed me how to fret the E string at the 15th fret and then check the string for play against the lower frets (he sure sounded like he knew what he was doing). Only then did he proceed to tune it--and it was rather badly out of tune. Which of course threw the neck out of (perfect) alignment again, then the tuning, etc, etc. But each adjustment was smaller than the last and soon the (fine) tuning of the strings did not adjust the neck and it was straight and in tune. Very, very nice of him to work that way on a guitar purchased elsewhere. To be fair, I did buy the amp from him (and a second amp, if you can believe it. A little Pignose with a couple of dead batteries. I have since replaced the batteries and now have another practice/travel/who knows amp. I secretly want it for myself to jam with SonofV as he plays the guitar and I play the harmonica. But I need a microphone first. I'm open to suggestions on that score as well. But I digress...) and a strap and cable. He earned my goodwill and my future business as well. I might stop in for one of those sweet Suzuki harps I saw in the display case....
So thanks to all for the extremely helpful advice and support. I'll give irregular updates, should events warrant such. Like playing a tune, or getting signed or something.