Site information isn’t just the title of this posting, it’s a category. The information I have is that I haven’t been posting because of post. The need to get the cards in the post was, as usual, urgent. I’m saying this time it was because of the family situation with the job and the kidney donation but, really, it might be more accurate to say nothing gets done without a deadline.
The OH has an alternate family he has adopted, for whom he has bought presents in a sale, which he is now wrapping to give. I’m quite surprised, I was expecting Christmas eve drama.
The holiday always creeps up on everyone.
I have in the past done all the shopping early, which absolutely kills the excitement. I’ve shopped in the summer sales for presents and then bought a similar thing twice because I couldn’t find the first one. The thing not to do is to buy something that might be a present for someone unspecified. It will still be in the drawer years from now, unless you entertain a lot. I have been entertained at such an event where a recipient was given an address book with a very seventies cover at a noughties party and the S&H, who was three at the time, was given an adult torch, which he loved.
I do remember standing at a bus stop in the rain just a few days before Christmas, with arms so full of presents I looked like a participant in Double or Drop and about to be gifted a cabbage if I did. I remember doing this twice particularly, once in Sunderland, once in Leamington Spa. Each time I knew I had exactly the right things for exactly the right giftees. This is a rare and treasurable state of mind. Generally if you find something utterly apposite it is unaffordable. Anyone would welcome a Rolls Royce or a really enormous diamond ring.
What I really want is more time. I feel this year that I can do the usual seasonal things such as three hours in a crowded shopping centre, but that afterwards I could do with a really long sit down. I think the OH and I have had subclinical something or other, we’ve been a bit fluey and sneezy but it never developed, thanks probably to the autumn injections. Also, the gift I am trying to give myself is a bit of weight loss before Christmas rather than the hatred of the post-festival older and wider hips that leads to three weeks of workout and sad starvation in the presence of trifles going off in the fridge and a half empty chocolate box, where hunger leads to the disgusting strawberry cremes being desirable right up to the point where the swallowing occurs. Not only will one swallow not make a summer beach-ready body, a whole flight of them will guarantee it isn’t, ever. So I am cutting down on food now, which could well be why I have less energy.
Some energy is well spent at this time of year, some not. I carefully made 65 very complex cards involving numerous processes and portraits of the OH and self, done from a selfie (because if I’d done them from a mirror no one would have recognised us except us.) I had the list and the OH’s list. Mid week I was done and gave the OH his share, whereupon he announced he wasn’t sending any this year. Then he got a card from a relative and had to. He tells me he cannot take them to the pub because he now goes to a different pub. Had he told me this a month ago I could have made a mere 53 cards a lot faster.
The family will be coming for Christmas in January when the DIL is well enough to travel, minus a kidney, which removes the urgency a terrible amount. So I am off to wrap the presents (boxes with some presents already having been sent) for January, so that, even in the event of no deadline at all, it gets done.
And then I will decorate, which will be early for me.
The OH announced darkly this morning that we were the only house on the street without decorations, as if he was going to do something about it. As I have traditionally remarked, Christmas is a festival of work for women, wherever you are in the world. Also I appear to have arranged for the central heating boiler to be serviced early doors January, which means that anything I haven’t bought now, I will not buy and we can jolly well do without. You have to do this in order not to join in with the third week in January Festival of misery-nothing-else-nice-will-ever-happen-again-I-didn’t-get-anything-I-wanted-and-now-I-am-fat-too, celebrations.
Bah without the humbug, humbugs are fattening.
A woman lies in bed on Christmas eve but cannot sleep for a noise: rap, rap, rap.*
She gets up and checks the turkey in the oven to make sure she didn’t accidentally turn the oven on.
She goes back to bed and hears: rap,rap,rap. She gets up again and leans out of the window to see if the neighbours’ children are having a rap party. They aren’t so she gets dried and goes back to bed.
Rap, rap, rap. She gets up, puts her slippers on and a cardigan and goes out to the car to check it isn’t being stolen. The wind blows and she just manages to run back to the door and jam her foot in it before the door slams shut.
She washes her foot and puts a sticking plaster on it and then goes back to bed.
Rap,rap,rap. Rapraparaprap, cher, boof, boof, boof, champ, champ.
Yes, it was her husband snoring all along. She hits him and tries to go to sleep but now she is cold and it’s five o’ clock anyway, so she gets up and makes a cup of tea.
Ho, ho, ho.
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Did you think it was the wrapping paper?