Merry Christmas

Well I failed on my make-a-post-a-day goal for the month. I didn’t write anything yesterday because I’m a child. I went to bed early on Christmas eve. Like, 9 at night early. I was too excited to stay awake! That’s so early that on days I work I’m still about 2 hours from my lunch break at 9 p.m. I am insane.

So my husband and I woke up at 4 in the morning today, laid around trying to convince ourselves we could sleep a little more, and then finally gave up and opened gifts at 5. And it was a great Christmas!

All the stuff the husband gave me!

It was a very Ellen Christmas this year. Maybe she will take notice and be my BFF, as I have written to her several times in the past to do. Ellen, if you are reading this, it is destiny for us to be friends. I know this, you should know this.

OK well I only have 2 minutes to hit PUBLISH or I’ll be two days down without a post in December, and I just can’t let that happen. I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Merry Ho-Ho-Boo-Hoo

My husband is really morbid. I don’t know if he was dropped on his head a few too many times as a child, or what, but he sure does get a kick out of gross, sad, deeply disturbing things.

A couple of weeks ago he was giggling at the thought of my life on Christmas had he died that moment. “Would you just stare at the pile of gifts and cry?” He asked me as he giggled like a fat eight year on a shopping spree in a candy shop. He wondered would I ever open them, if I did would I enjoy them? What would I do with the gifts I gave him? Would I keep them for myself or would I return them? He went on and on as I melted into sobs, all the while he was giggling more and more.

Yes, he took this picture of me real time as he was spewing this sad crap!

What would I do if he knew he was going to die before Christmas, so arranged for gifts to be delivered to me each Christmas? There it would come, every Christmas, a reminder of my loss. What would I do if I had moved on from him, and was with someone else who made me happier? These are the things that kept spewing from his mouth!

Finally he stopped, realizing how upsetting these thoughts were. I cry at sappy McDonald’s commercials, so all these thoughts of my husband mysteriously dying days before Christmas….you know what I can’t talk about it, it’s just too sad.

Tonight he came up with a gem, there is a parallel universe where we are divorced and don’t even care about the Christmas gifts we have for each other now. Sigh.

This is what I live with. At least he keeps me entertained. It’s always untelling what is going to come out of his mouth next.

I’m High on Life

Days like today make me wonder why I decided to write a post a day for December. When I do my post I usually write it after work around 3 or 4 a.m. I wasn’t able to do that last night because I was out of town at my family’s Christmas party. Oh well, the day isn’t up yet!

I managed to find an excuse to yell “I’m high on life!” twice yesterday as I was visiting family. I have such a goofy bunch of relatives that it’s hard to pin-point just exactly which one the “crazy”  one is. I think we’re all in the running. At any rate, I think sometimes I get so silly goofy that people probably think I’m on drugs. I’ve never done drugs though, not even pot. I just get really paranoid at the idea.

I have a weird sleep schedule. I don’t get off work until 3 a.m., so the earliest I could be in bed would be around that time. But everyone knows you can’t just go straight to bed after work. Normally I need a bit of a snack, then I start catching up on TV or catching up on things online or any number of things people do post-work. A few months ago I realized I was going to bed regularly around 8 a.m. Not that I really like it, but that’s just how it was. Also, I don’t drive. Yeah yeah I’m pushing 30 and don’t have a license, get off my back.

Anyway, my mom lives about an hour away but always travels through my way on Saturday’s, at 9 a.m. So I hitched a ride with mom back home to the Christmas party.  By 8 a.m. I hadn’t slept, but for some reason felt getting a 20 minute nap would help, so I did. It didn’t really help. At any rate that was the only sleep I had. By the time the Christmas party started at 5 I was feeling loopy, by the time it ended at 10 I had already fallen asleep sitting up twice and God-knows what insanity spewed from my mouth. I remember cackling at my nephew Gabe’s toy that sings “Yankee Doodle” when you press its stomach.

That pretty much had me entertained for a good while. Who comes up with these things? And why haven’t I come up with these things?

This whole thing was a really long and roundabout way of saying – I haven’t had much sleep so I’m a little loopy.

Wenches! Save Money at Christmas!

My tips for saving a little cash during the holiday. While I might not be an expert, by any means, I do try to save a buck if I can.

1. Shop around. Find things you might want to buy for a person in an actual store, and then go online to see if you can find a better deal. Case in point – I found a book for $15 at the local book store, and then went to Amazon.com and found the same book for $10 (free shipping because my order was over $25)

2. If you go to the stores to shop, don’t settle on the first thing you find for someone. Keep looking for a similar item, if it’s appropriate. Of course, if you’re going to the store specifically for a Malibu Barbie, for instance, you can’t do this (and why would you, unless you went back in time to 1971? And if you were going back in time, you probably don’t have to worry about saving a buck because you’re rich for inventing time travel!). But if for instance you want to buy someone a mop, shop around the mop section to find the best deal.*

3. Get creative. If a kid likes, lets say Elmo for example, don’t go for the hot toy of the year, search around online and in stores for smaller Elmo-themed things that are less expensive. This way you can buy a few small things with Elmo on them and give the kid more toys, while saving money. For example, I went on Ebay and bought 5 “Elmo” things for around $9 total, including shipping. They were all small things, so I wrapped each one individually because kids love unwrapping things!

4. Don’t shy away from Black Friday/Cyber Monday. It’s too late for that this year, but next year give it a go if you haven’t. I generally advise not actually going out to the stores, that’s not safe for anyone! But stores online have great deals during that weekend that are hard to pass up. I bought many items 30%-50% off. I may have lost a chunk of my soul in the process, but hey, a bucks a buck right?

5. The top three sites I use to save money, during the holidays or any time of the year are amazon.com, half.com, and ebay.com. It’s not as easy as it used to be to find deals on Ebay, but it’s still good to check. Whichever site you use though, make sure to shop around a few of them. You may find something on Amazon for $10 while half.com has it for $5. Just be sure to take shipping into consideration.

6. Don’t stress out. Have fun with Christmas shopping. People get so worked up about how “materialistic” it makes people, but they forget that (religious aspects aside) Christmas is about giving gifts and celebrating friends and family. So Black Friday might be a completely insane tradition in our society, but it allowed me to get more things for my husband, and I’m truly glad to be able to give him so many things this Christmas morning. Ok that got really sappy and I hate sappy so I have to rectify that. Damn ye wenches get in thine kitchen and ponder over thine dinner…. I have no idea what that means, it’s just the first thing that came to mind…

*Don’t buy anyone a mop, unless they specifically ask for a mop. And in that case, just go ahead and don’t associate with that person, because anyone asking for a mop for Christmas is untrustworthy!

Christmas Bows

I really enjoy making things. The result isn’t always that wonderful, and I almost always give up on the instructions halfway through whatever it is I’m making. You know, it’s just more exciting to wing it. Anyway, since the great Black Friday Insanity of 2011 I’m pretty much done with my Christmas shopping for the year. Which had my house full of unwrapped gifts, piled there mocking me.

“Just show him what you got, it’s no big deal.”, they’d whisper into my ear at night.

“Why make him wait a whole month to enjoy my awesomeness.” the gifts would taunt me.

Well, since I didn’t want my husband to have me committed to a mental hospital for talking to gifts all day, I decided the best course of action would be to actually wrap the darn things.

So, I set off to Wal-Mart. Bad idea this time of year by the way. I almost took out a family of three who would not move from the middle of the aisle as they complained about “not wanting to wrap the bowl.” One shreiked at her mother, “Let me buy the cookies… I’m not wrapping the damn bowl… I’m getting pissed off here.”

Shut up about the bowl…there is a nice big gift bag there just begging you to buy it. It whispered into my ear, “Please no! Don’t let these people take me home with them!”  But I was ready to sacrifice the bag in order to save my own sanity.

….I don’t think it worked.

Ahem, what was I saying? Oh yeah, wrapping gifts so they’d stop talking to me. There really is a point to this, I promise.

So, I picked out some wrapping paper that looked nice and festive. Then I moved onto the ribbon. I remember as a kid my grandmother (Memaw as she will be referred to as from here on) would make the most amazing bows for Christmas. I used to live with my grandparents (both maternal and paternal but that’s another story for another day) so I would spend a lot of Christmas’s in their homes. Memaw is always a fan of things that are home-made. Always home-made cookies over store bought cookie dough, for instance. Anyway, as a kid I used to watch her make so many pretty bows for Christmas gifts. She’d put so much time and care into each and every one.

So as I stood there in the middle of a clogged up Wal-Mart aisle unable to move around people whining about wrapping bowls, and buying cookies, I thought to myself, “Self, let’s make our own bows this year.” And to that I said, aye.

Not particularly knowing how to go about this bow making business, I went to trusty ole Google to do a search. I came across something completely awesome! How to make a bow out of a magazine! Jackpot! I just had to try it.

It took me a couple of tries, but I finally got it! Using a page from a Frederick’s lingerie catalogue, I made a bow for a friend who….likes Frederick’s lingerie catalogues for lack of a better word. Ahem, you know what I mean.

Anyway, here is the result:

Here are all the parts of the bow, before I put them together.

Here is the completed bow.

I think I will be making a lot more of these things before Christmas rolls around. Maybe it was a good thing that I finished my shopping a month in advance, it gives me just enough time to procrastinate all month and then whip up a bunch of bows at the last minute.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have some ice cream in the freezer asking me to eat it.

The Horror! The Horror!

I’m sitting here in a post-turkey haze casually perusing Black Friday ads on the internet. I’m not expecting to find anything much, but my husband mentioned a thing or two here and there. I think to myself “No biggie to just check em out ole chap!” (Why I’m calling myself ole chap is beyond me.) And suddenly, I saw that things were 30-50% off and I JUST HAD TO HAVE THEM!

I don’t know what happened to me. One second I was normal me (normal is a strong word probably…) And the next I was some crazed rabid insane person freaking out over things that are on sale. I mean, it got bad. I’d have 4 sites up comparing prices, and then find something else I’d want on one of the sites and compare prices and find more things and compare prices and before I knew it I was processing simultaneous checkouts from about 3 different websites.

One site, which will remain unnamed because I don’t want my husband to know what I bought crashed about 1224080273 times. I still haven’t managed to make my purchase. After about an hour headache I gave up, then came back to it and made it to the check out only for the site to crash! I’m losing my mind over here! I…MUST…HAVE…THIS…DEAL!

Ok this is getting sad, no joke. I like saving a buck just as much as the next person but why does it have to be insane like this? My stomach is literally in knots, I have stressed myself out over this insanity! Last week I was at the store and this man was looking for a particular doll, and he found one but it was blue and his daughter just had to have pink. The look in his eyes was just sad, he knew his life was over if he went home with a blue doll instead of a pink one. Finally a clerk helped him find a pink doll and just the relief that washed over that poor man was palpable! Poor guy.

I’ve never been one for Black Friday, and I’m not sure why this year turned me into a rabid dog. I blame Voldemort. This is his doing, right?