My grandparents' gift was the first gift to arrive here at the house, but it's somewhat small (most likely another Wedgwood ornament), and I'm afraid either the cats or Gracie will run off with it. I'm keeping it until Christmas in the entertainment center.
Then I got to looking at the box that my mom's gift came in, and I thought to myself, "Self, that looks like a damn good box to put the family's gifts in to send home!!!"
You ever have a great idea like that only to have it turn out that it wasn't such a great idea???
I trekked into the garage to get my wrapping paper out of my Rubbermaid gift wrap keeper, which I leave open during the Christmas season because that thing is damn hard to open. Then I went on a wrapping frenzy and wrapped my stepmom's two gifts, my dad's gift, and my grandparents' gift. My brother's gift is en route to Dad's house from the merchant.
Don't get me wrong -- I actually LIKE to wrap. There's something about getting it all nice and straight and even that gives me a great deal of pleasure. I'm a perfectionist in some things, and since I can almost always wrap a gift in a near-professional way, it makes me happy. When I lived at home, I used to take over some of my stepmom's wrapping duties because she hates it and thinks it's vile.
So the gifts were all wrapped; now it was time to find a box. The box I thought was going to work looked too small for my dad's gift, which is a rather long box. I tried my packing peanut box, which meant first I had to transfer all my packing peanuts to a garbage bag -- and that, my dear friends, was HIGHLY frustrating. Plus I can't just leave the peanuts on the floor. I have cats who think they are wonderful playthings, and they're dumb enough to eat them and end up with an intestinal blockage. Finally I got all the peanuts into the bag and put the gifts in the big box. It was TOO big.
So I trekked back into the garage and found a rather decrepit Land's End box, which turned out to be too large as well.
I grabbed the first box I was going to use and forcibly squeezed Dad's gift into it, and packed my stepmom's gifts and my grandparents' gift around it. And voila!! A packed box.
By this time I'd made a massive mess of the kitchen. It's a damn good thing I went out to dinner today because otherwise I would have been just too frustrated to clean my kitchen twice in one day. But the box is all ready to go, once I make up a label for it, and then I'll just have to go visit the world's greatest postmistress down at my post office.
Somehow I also managed to slice open the top of my left index finger. You know how I found out??? I used hand sanitizer after cleaning out the catbox.
OWEEEEE!!!!
Not fun.
And so the end of Christmas shopping is in sight. I need to get Kurt's present and Grace's gift, but both of those are a matter of simply going to town and buying them. Everyone else is taken care of, except for shipping. Wooo!! No December stress for me!