Christmas 2012

[Big Red]

This year has been a challenge. I might post more on that sometime in the next couple days. Suffice to say, as of last Monday we had yet to buy a single Christmas gift this year. As someone who, at one point in the past, was known to get virtually all his Christmas shopping done by the end of October, the realization that I was halfway through November without a single gift purchased was a bit disheartening to say the least. The past 4-5 days that followed weren't much better, although we did manage to buy one actual gift and a couple stocking stuffers. I looked at our schedule for the next month, then talked to my wife on Sunday and suggested we try to get every last bit of our shopping done by the end of the day on Tuesday (which was today for me as recently as an hour ago). We realized it would be difficult, but after a planning session we figured we had a decent shot at it.

I ran out early Monday morning and bought a huge stack of gift cards. I thought I had budgeted everything fairly well and wanted to get the fuel points. I then ran home and we did the bulk of our online shopping. It took far longer than expected, mainly because Toys 'R Us has the worst website on the planet which is so criminally inept in every aspect, someone should be boiled in oil for concocting such a travesty. We then picked the girls up from school and tried to get as much done as possible that evening, but one mishap after another kept us from making much progress. By Monday night, with only one additional present in our possession, I had little hope of finishing by Tuesday evening. I tried to remain positive, but I wasn't succeeding.

I woke up this morning with a fresh outlook, however, and after dropping the girls at school and having a decent breakfast at Subway, I started feeling we still might succeed. The next six hours were a mad dash from one store to another. Each one took longer and cost more than expected, but the free space in the trunk kept shrinking while my optimism kept growing. We rushed home and I had just enough time to drop everything off and check a couple important emails before rushing back out to get the girls, then back home so I could drop them off with my mom and pick my wife up so I could take her to a doctors appointment. This proved to be a huge road bump and we got home much later than expected. A big part of my plans for the day was to take my son out and let him pick out a couple items (mainly gloves). The delay at the doctors' office meant that we left the house for our evening excursion about an hour later than planned. Still, we'd made great time during the day so all I really needed to do was get my son squared away then get home and make a couple more online purchases in order for the day to be a complete success.

To give a little background on the glove situation, last year our son told us that the gloves he had just weren't cutting it. He was coming home with 12th degree frost burn most evenings (not really, but if you'd heard him tell it you'd think so) and he feared for his fingers, if not his life as a consequence. He explained that he needed not just any gloves, but the warmest gloves we could possibly find. I searched locally but nothing seemed up to snuff. I then checked Amazon and found a pair that sounded like they'd fit the bill. They had nearly a perfect 5-star rating and just looking at them made me feel warmer. They had several layers of proprietary, top-secret, patented insulating fabric and were water repellant as well. They also had sets of drawstrings--one at the wrist and another halfway up the forearm--which not only helped with the insulation but I'm pretty sure resulted as them being rated as scuba gear as well. I spent a small fortune on them, and when they arrived I gave them a try. As luck would have it, it was bitterly cold that day. I stepped outside and strapped them on. While the rest of my body was painfully cold, my hands were almost uncomfortably hot. They were great! I figured this would go down in my son's Christmas annals with as much fondness as Ralphie's Red Ryder BB gun.

No such luck. Here it is a year later and he's yet to wear them. He has all manner of complaint about them, but I think his main beef is that they're not black and don't mesh with his brooding ways. He still complains relentlessly about not having a good pair of gloves and after a healthy dose of persuasion from my wife, I finally decided that gloves would make a perfect gift this year. We tried Dick's Sporting Goods and quickly decided that instead of trying to pick a pair on our own only to have another $50 go wasted, I'd take my son out and let him pick. My wife told me I was brilliant, then gave a little additional detail about what our son was looking for. She said he wanted a pair of ultra-thin yet fully water repellant pair of gloves that would let him pick a dust mite up off a needle while keeping his hands nice and toasty even when encased in a block of dry ice. I told myself it couldn't be as bad as all that. Boy, was I wrong.

Standing in glove aisle at Wal-Mart (I'd made a judgment call against the sporting goods store, figuring that if the situation was as bleak as my wife had let on we'd be wasting any money we spent on the darn things), I found the situation growing ever more dire as I argued pointlessly with my son about whether the gloves he wanted could even exist without breaking at least 23 laws of physics. I guessed that even if I did manage to talk him into a pair of gloves, I'd either be too tired or it would be too late to get anything else done afterward. He wouldn't budge, though. He wanted nothing short of the unobtainium specials and I couldn't talk him into anything that, you know, actually existed. He finally clued me into the fact that these mythical gloves he'd been dreaming of were (in his mind's eye, at least) identical to the gloves used by NFL wide receivers. I tried to explain that, regardless of how he wanted to imagine things, the wide receiver gloves aren't much more than ultra-thin gloves covered with an adhesive surface which allows the wide receiving to get a better grip on the ball. He wasn't buying it, though. We wandered throughout the store discussing this as my headache grew and at least 14 new gray hairs appeared. I finally led us to the sporting goods department where we found some wide receiver gloves. When he saw I was right about them, he finally relented and I was able to get him to pick out a pair.

The fortuitous stumbling-upon of the football gloves allowed me to not only hit the other stores I had to go to, but I got home in time to get everything put away and all but two of those other online orders placed before midnight. As it stands, I have two gifts to order for my wife, one each to buy for the kids and then a pair of gifts for whomever my wife & draw in our family exchange (she still has to buy for her mom, but that's her domain). I'm beat, but I'm thrilled that I'm almost done and that I got everything done that I'd set out to do this morning.

[Qui-Gon Jim]

Haven't read it yet, but seeing a wall of BR text is like a Christmas miracle!

[Big Red]

Haven't read it yet, but seeing a wall of BR text is like a Christmas miracle!

I might test the post length limit later tonight.

[figureaddict]

I've already discovered that there is a minnimum text allowed.

[Big Red]

I just found that there's a 10k character limit. Boo-urns! Boo-urns! Someone needs to fix that, stat!

[Jodo]

The sub-cockles of my heart have been warmed with the return of BR posts!

[Big Red]

So I thought I was done with my Christmas shopping and all related activities (aside from wrapping) earlier today. I had a few packages sitting in the bedroom that I hadn't opened yet, but since I'd given each a once-over when they arrived, I wasn't too concerned. As luck would have it, I glanced at the package from Barnes & Noble again and saw that one corner was utterly crushed. I opened it up and one of the books inside was quite damaged. I proceeded to open the other packages and everything else was okay. I took the book to one of the local stores to return it. While that went off virtually without a hitch, it was an unnerving experience overall because the cashier who helped me had hairy arms. I'm not talking just hairier than normal; instead, she had "homemade gorilla suit" hairy arms. I nearly asked her where she got her sweater until I realized she wasn't wearing one. Very helpful, though.

On the way home, I ran to the grocery store to pick up some milk. I wanted to get some gift boxes as well. Years back I tended to be a bulk shopper. In other words, if something was on sale, I bought it in bulk. Even if it was something we only used once a year, if I found a great bargain I would stock up on it. And by "stock up," I mean, "buy more than I could use in a decade." This applied to everything from toilet paper and black beans, to wrapping paper and gift boxes. As a result, we ended up with two storage containers full of wrapping paper, as well as some stashed in not only the corner of our bedroom but the back of the basement as well. We have a huge bag full of ribbons and bows even though my wife and I seldom have the motivation to put them on our packages (when you're wrapping for five kids, you want to get through the wrapping as quickly as possible--and of course I mean when we're actually wrapping gifts and not the times we just tell the kids we're wrapping gifts). We also had, at one point, at least 50 gift boxes. Most of these were just the sort you put shirts, sweaters or socks in, but we also had some really cool, odd-sized, decorated boxes as well.

The place we did most of our wrapping supply stocking up was at Target. We have a long-standing tradition of shopping there the day after Christmas to take advantage of their clearance sale. We have a tradition that's just as old of shopping there a week or so after Christmas to take advantage of their last-chance clearance sale. It's at the latter that we did most of our stocking up over the years, picking up whole rolls of paper for as little as a dime. At one of these sales a few years ago, as I stood in the mangled remnants of the Christmas section with a cart full of paper, boxes, ribbons, bows and 2006 ornaments, my wife asked me if we really needed to keep doing this. She said we had more paper than we could ever expect to use in a reasonable amount of time, especially since we'd switched to having more modest Christmases several years before that. She pointed out all the paper we had at home that we both despised yet never seemed to go away. To give you an idea of how long some of this paper has been hanging around, unless I missed a roll, we finally used up the last of the Episode 1 Christmas wrapping paper last year (I suspect a lot of you know know what I'm talking about--all the Naboo and Trade Federation ships, plus a few bows, on a black background). I told her she was probably right, and except for a few rolls that I've bought just for Santa gifts, we decided that we wouldn't buy another roll of paper until our entire stock was gone.

The best part about this is that it gives me a real sense of achievement each year as we use up another roll. In addition to the Episode 1 paper, I finally killed off the worst wrapping paper in history last year. I liked it when I first bought it back in '96 or so. It was light blue and covered with white and darker blue snowflakes. It wasn't unattractive but it was improbably thin. The main side effect of this is that it would rip several times no matter how small or larger the item you were wrapping. Just as maddening, though, was the fact that it never seemed to end. Looking at a decent, sturdy roll of paper, after a gift or two you can guess about how many more you can get out of the roll based on how thick the paper left on the roll is. With this paper, since 2002 or so I figured we only had enough paper left for another 4-5 gifts. In 2008 or 2009, I was so hellbent on using this roll up that I violated my own policy on having a wide variety of paper under the tree and used this paper for virtually everything. Nearly 90% of what was under our tree and every gift we gave to the family was wrapped in that light blue, snowflake pattern (as well as a healthy dose of tape to hold together all those tears) which had become so appalling to me. When I was done, it didn't look like I'd made a dent in the roll. I was nearly convinced that it was somehow regenerating itself as I wrapped. Last year though, much to my delight, I finally used up the last few feet of the roll. It was truly a Christmas miracle! Unfortunately, I used up nearly all of our gift boxes as well.

Gift boxes are a funny thing because they truly do regenerate themselves. No matter how many you use in any given year, you always get some back. We always buy the kids a good amount of clothes for Christmas so we should have gone through those 50-60 boxes we had back in '06 fairly quickly, but the regenerative properties of gift boxes made them last a good deal longer. We knew we were running low in 2010, so during one of my last documented trips into Meijer, I stocked up on these pretty cool decorated boxes during their after-Christmas clearance sale. They were your standard size clothing boxes, but each had a really nice picture on top. While there was no paper to rip off, we had some awesome-looking packages under the tree last year. This year, though, with at least 20 items needing boxes, we're down to just three. This led to me wanting to pick some up tonight.

While the store did have gift boxes, they seemed way over-priced for what they were offering ($1.99 for three boxes). Perhaps it's just my being used to clearance prices, but I was pretty sure Target had larger packages of boxes for a comparable amount. Regardless, I passed on the boxes and will have to either pick some up in the morning or wait until this weekend. At this point I probably won't get to start wrapping until Saturday anyway. Hopefully by then all my packages will have arrived and I won't have any other returns to make.

[Big Red]

Turns out that I was completely wrong about the Star Wars wrapping paper. We still have two half-rolls left. Looks like our son's having a Star Wars Christmas!

[figureaddict]

Funny just how long it takes to get rid of rolls of wrapping paper. We still have some that are well over ten years old too.

[Big Red]

As it turns out, I have a problem with another order. This time it was a missing item, no damage. I've already called for a replacement. I think I need to come up with a spreadsheet of all my Christmas orders so I can check them off as they arrive and make sure I don't miss anything.