taco cat goat cheese pizza

I would like to tell you about ordering this game Rachel who wanted it for Christmasthis year:

1) not available on Amazon (what is EVER not available on Amazon??)

2) not available at my local Target

3) available at a Target an hour away, so I order it, I'm going to be in that city in 5 days

4) Target says it's ready and must be picked up in 3 days 😬

5) I call, cancel my order, set a reminder to order again in two days

6) In 2 days, game no longer available at any Target in the state of Oregon

7) I googled to see what other stores sell this game: Barnes & Noble

8) Of course not my Barnes & Noble

9) I give up, order from B&N online, pay almost as much for shipping as for the game.

🤷

She was excited. 😉

Christmas thoughts

I just typed out a big response to a Facebook post, and then thought that I would keep it because it contains an evolution that is important to me.

Our family used to be in the unequal category--I took care of all of the Christmas things, and Russ didn't do anything except help with some decorations. While we didn't have huge Christmases, I grew up poor and it was very important to me that we had "enough" Christmas.  I'm not a huge gifts person, but my Russ isn't at all.  Then I did two things that really helped our family, and a third later.  

First, I told Russ that he was on his own with his parents.  If it's not important enough to him to do something, that's his deal.  Second, I pointed out that we were creating selfish Christmas kids because they weren't giving any gifts, just getting them.  (We both come from large families so there wasn't gift giving between families by the time our kids were old enough to really take part.) He started taking them to the dollar store to choose gifts, and for several years we received truly terrible gifts.  😉 (Because the kids were young and picked terrible gifts, not because it's not possible to find a decent gift at the dollar tree.) When our kids were older they decided to do a random gift exchange and we have done that using elfster for many years now.

When our youngest kids were about 15, I decided I couldn't do Christmas the same anymore. For us, once our kids were that age the things they really wanted were things that were outside of our Christmas budget.  It bothered me for a couple of years, and on this particular year it just all came to a head. I felt like I was almost randomly buying things just to hit some imaginary gift quota, and it was really not in keeping with some other values that I have. I told our kids after Christmas that year that I was changing things from that year forward, and that instead of spending money on things that were fairly meaningless, we would spend money on things like experiences instead. I've made sure that everybody has something to unwrap on Christmas morning, and this year (2021) because experiences are a little iffy still 🤣 everybody had two. We had to work on being very intentional with our Christmas morning so that everything wasn't over too fast.  It's had the lovely side effect of making the kids gift to each other even more important.  Anyway, all of that has helped me not feel like I'm a stressed out one woman Christmas show!