Don't hang around outside of my house during a storm. You're likely to get impaled by a large patio umbrella (or at least you were until now). Last night it stormed. When I went to let the dogs in, I noticed that my patio umbrella was gone. It had somehow flown over my 6' privacy fence and was nowhere to be found. This morning, I decided to look around and found it at the side of my house, nose down in the grass. It was all torn up, so I put it out with the trash. I hope they'll pick it up. Who knows...they have all kinds of rules about what they will and will not pick up.
I started my Christmas shopping yesterday. Every time I go to Pier 1, I fall in love with it all over again. I miss working there.
The only problem with early Christmas shopping is having to store all the stuff until I put my tree up. I really prefer to have all my shopping done before Thanksgiving. Shopping after Thanksgiving makes me foam at the mouth a little.
Have I vented before about my family not drawing names? Off the top of my head I can think of 18 people I have to buy gifts for (and I'm leaving some people out)--the majority of which have everything they want already and don't need anything, plus I never see them to know what they would like. When one realizes that what we're basically doing is trading gift cards, one also realizes that exchanging gifts is a little...stupid. How 'bout you keep your $20 gift card and I keep my $20 gift card and we call it even? Perhaps we could adopt a needy family and buy their Christmas gifts instead? There are people all over the place starving to death and we're spending our money on frivolous things that other people don't really want/need. Am I crazy, or is something kind of wrong with that? I'm not trying to be a party pooper. It's fun to exchange gifts and all that, but it's just over the top with my family. We fill up a whole room with gifts, like two or three feet deep and the kicker is that most people in my family don't even like eachother. They just buy the gifts out of obligation...all the while they're talking about eachother behind their backs.
It's just silly.
2 comments:
Maybe you could do a dirty santa kind of thing with your family. Pick a dollar amount and each person buys one gift for somewhere around that amount. You can split it up to women buying womens gifts and men for men.
Have everyone draw a number, and the first person just picks a gift and unwraps it. Everyone gets to see what that person got. #2 person opens a gift and gets to choose to 'keep' the one they got, or switch with #1. The way that we do it, a gift can change hands many times. The last person gets to trade down to any of the people. Your turn is over on trading with people below you when the next person starts. The only thing is, the first person to have gone gets to have the last laugh and switch with any one person.
anonymous--That would be a fun idea. Or even drawing names would be a fun idea. Anything to get the focus off super-extra commercialism. Old habits die hard though.
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