Anderson Cooper’s son Wyatt is learning an important lesson this holiday season: There are things you want, and things you kneed.

The longtime CNN host revealed on his podcast All There Is with Anderson Cooper Wednesday that his nearly 4-year-old son “has fully woken up to the fact that Santa brings gifts, reindeer land on roofs, and ‘Jingle Bells’ is a song he can sing all day long.”

His son’s Christmas list, however, has a surprise entry.

“He wants a toy car, two candy canes, a rainbow, a pillow, and knees. For the record, he has two knees that seem to work just fine, but apparently, he wants some back-ups,” Cooper said. 

Cooper is also parent to 18-month-old Sebastian, who does not seem to have articulated his desire for any festive body parts as of yet. The journalist shares the boys with ex-boyfriend Benjamin Maisani. They broke up in 2018, but he calls Maisani his “best friend.”

“Wyatt calls me ‘daddy’ and Benjamin ‘papa,’” Cooper said when he announced Sebastian’s birth on air on CNN in 2022. “We’re a family. Benjamin is also in the process of adopting Wyatt, whose last name will be changed to Maisani-Cooper as well.”

At the time, Cooper described the days-old Sebastian’s simple interests.

“He mostly just sleeps and eats and certainly poops, but he already seems like a wise and thoughtful little chap,” he said.

Both the boys were carried by a surrogate, a role that Cooper’s late mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, once offered to take on.

“She’s like, ‘Well, you know, you can get an egg anywhere these days,’” he recounted during a 2021 appearance on Late Night with Stephen Colbert. “I was like, ‘Uh huh.’ She was like, ‘Well, what I was thinking is, you get an egg and, you know, fertilize it with your sperm, and I’ll carry your child.’”

He continued, “I was just stunned. And I finally said to her, I was like, ‘You know, Mom, I love you, but even for you that is just batshit crazy. That’s just nuts.’ I was like, ‘That is just weirdly Oedipal on a whole other level. That kid would be on the front page of the New York Post for the rest of its life.’”