The Lady Loves Christmas

If a picture is worth a thousand words, surely a video is worth even more than that!

In December a friend posted this commercial on my Facebook Wall:

Countdown to Christmas

Imagine the girl in this ad thirty years older, significantly taller, and with a pet cat, and you’re picturing ME! I immediately hit every Hallmark store in a 10 mile radius but they were completely sold out. Disappointing, yes, but since I have a clock running in my head counting down to Christmas, I managed to live with this void.

Fast-forward to today: while many women are posting photos of the flowers they got, or talking about the fancy dinners they are about to indulge in, I open my gift to see this:

Better than a diamond necklace! Does my husband know me or what?

(*this blog post is not sponsored by ESPN)

My husband went grocery shopping this morning** and when he returned, his hair slightly disheveled, he announced between gasps of air that the grocery store was crowded. Everyone was shopping for the Super Bowl.

This reminded me of Christmas – and not just because everything reminds me of Christmas. The following is a by-no-means-comprehensive list of the ways the Super Bowl and Christmas are alike, and the ways they are different.

Ways they are alike:

1. They both involve beards. Santa Claus has a beard, and the football players and fans grow “playoff beards” (to the regret of wives and girlfriends everywhere).

2. They both involve food. Unhealthy, abundant, glorious food.

3. One is known for its commercials, and one is often found to be commercialized.

4. Both only come once a year.

5. People tend to feel a little down the day after. Unless your team won, or one of your presents was an iPad.

6. Both involve dressing in certain colors.

7. Both happen in the winter. The cold, dark, bleak midwinter. When people need to be cheered up.

Ways they are different:

1. There’s no Santa Claus in football. (No, Ben Roethlisberger doesn’t count.)

2. Though you welcome people into your home with food, there are no actual gifts exchanged.

3. Christmas, as far as I know, never involves betting.

4. Men don’t cook at Christmas. (With the exception of my husband**.)

5. There’s no cheerleaders, but there are elves. Though the teams in this year’s Super Bowl have no cheerleaders OR elves.

6. There are no wardrobe malfunctions at Christmas. Office parties with open bars don’t count.

Surely these lists are not complete! Let me know what I’ve overlooked!

**Yes, I have a wonderful husband.

My last post extolled the virtues about buying Christmas gifts year-round, rather than during a December sprint. However, some people put off buying gifts because the whole process can be fraught with peril. Especially if you think about it this way: it isn’t just a gift. It is the year-end summary of your friendship, relationship, or family tie, all wrapped up with a neat little bow. (Unless you lost your bag of bows.)

Do yourself a favor, and don’t think about it that way. It really is just a gift. Some years the gift you give will be a great hit, some years it will be on its way to Good Will the next day – but that’s okay. You’ll never know, and you can’t always bat a thousand.

But you CAN increase your batting average. There is one simple secret to giving a gift that will be loved, and that is: pay attention.

People drop a surprisingly number of clues in casual conversation that you can easily parlay into a thoughtful gift. Is a friend planning a long-awaited trip next summer? Hello, Lonely Planet! Is a relative spending her first Christmas in her own home? How about a tree skirt to go along with the tree she just bought?  Gifts like these are not expensive, and they are very touching. It shows how well you know the person.

Last year we had a couple over for dinner, and they raved about the rice we made to accompany the fish. I didn’t know anyone could get so excited about a bleached non-enriched grain, but there you have it, they were swooning. To my ears, their adulation wasn’t simple dinner conversation – it was a gift-giving gold mine!

We saw this couple again that December, and they starting reminiscing about the rice we made — right before unwrapping our gifts to them: their very own rice cooker and a bag of starter rice. Hey, you can’t make this stuff up.

But the truth is, you just can’t always hit a home run when you give a gift. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Some years, someone may just stump you, and all you can do is the best you can. Even then you may be on to something – a few times I’ve gotten a gift that I appreciated, but didn’t think I’d use. To my surprise, many of these gifts became my favorites.

Which just goes to show sometimes you know people even better than they know themselves!

As noted earlier, I love giving gifts. However, because I don’t have an Infinity Time Maker or an Infinity Money Maker, I have some strategies so that I don’t spend all of December rushing around buying things I can’t afford.

The motto I live by is: shop all year.

Haven’t you ever been in a store and thought, “Wow, that is just Aunt Wuzzle’s style?” But it’s May and you’re there to buy yourself a pair of flip flops, and you refuse to deviate from your course. Next time this happens, pause and consider buying that item for your favorite Aunt Wuzzle and putting it aside for Christmas. Below is a list of your mental arguments, and my refuting statements.

1. “I can’t afford to buy it today.”

Believe me, I am all about living beneath one’s means. But do you normally exchange gifts in this price range with this person? If so, ask yourself this: Will it be easier for your to afford it in December? I rest my case. Just skip a few days of lattes this week and you’ll be fine.

2. “If I buy it today, I will lose it.”

Yes, you probably will. Which is why I recommend A Place For Gifts somewhere in your home. Perhaps it’s the top shelf of your closet, under your bed, or in the attic. Once you have a designated area, always keep future gifts there, you’ll know exactly where they are! After all, you always know where your car is, right? No, no, not because it’s huge and hard to lose – it’s because you always park it in the same place, silly.

My personal method of corralling gifts in an appropriately labeled gift bin:

This puppy gets opened up in November when I start my wrapping. It’s like Christmas for me all over again!

3. “I’ll forget I bought it.”

If you follow Step 2, even if you forget, you can go to your Place For Gifts and it will be sitting there waiting for you! But if you’re really that afraid of keeping track of what you’ve bought for who, I suggest keeping a list.

4. “Why would I keep a list?”

Ah, I’m glad you asked that! Because it’s really darn handy. You can also write down gift ideas for people, and you’ll be glad you did. Great gift ideas are like vivid dreams: you’re certain you’ll remember then, but you won’t. Write it down and allow yourself to marvel at your own brilliance!

5. “I won’t be able to resist giving it to them right away.”

Believe me this is tough. Consider writing on the person’s Facebook wall. (“Aunt Wuzzle, I just got your Christmas gift!”) Then go put the gift in your designated spot. Immediately.

It’s easy to feel a little down after the holidays. For so long your life is consumed with them. You’re getting ready for Thanksgiving! Putting up the Christmas tree! (Not necessarily in that order, in my case.) Wrapping presents! Putting up lights!

Then the holidays are over, and you realize something: it’s cold. And dark. And you hate the cold and the dark.

I realized one year what made the post-holiday period even worse was that I didn’t have anything to focus on. There wasn’t an event coming up that was pulling me toward the future. My husband always reassured me I could start getting ready for the NEXT Christmas (and believe me, to some extent I did), but I needed something more immediate.

Enter: New Year’s Resolutions.

I know what you’re thinking. “I can never keep them.” To that I say, who cares? That in no way means you shouldn’t make them.

Last year I made a New Year’s Resolution to walk 10,000 steps a day. On those freezing early-January days, when I was out puffing my way around my apartment complex, I really would have rather been under a warm blanket. But I always felt better after I went for a walk, and soon it wasn’t an arduous chore but something I looked forward to.

Did I keep the resolution for the entire year? Heck no. I’ve found that with resolutions, momentum is the key. I kept it up until February 3rd, missed one day, and just couldn’t quite get a streak going again.

But that’s okay – by then I was over my post-holiday blues. Spring was just around the corner.

I love giving gifts. I love the thrill of the hunt – of finding just the right gift for just the right person. (And the right gift is like true love, when you find it you just know.) People often complain about Christmas being too commercial – they feel an obligation to spend a lot of money just to keep family and friends happy. But the right present is usually not the most expensive one, it’s the most thoughtful one.

I knew this past Christmas was going to be a difficult one for me and my sister. Our father passed away in March, and the first Christmas without a loved one is always hard. (My mother passed away in ’98, and in many ways she was the original Lady Loves Christmas. Her personal motto was, “If it doesn’t move, decorate it!”.)

I wanted to give my sister a gift that would acknowledge our father and all he meant to her.  But what present could possibly convey all of that?

Well, when I was cleaning out my father’s apartment this spring I came across his favorite t-shirts hanging proudly in his closet. We had given him most of them over the years, and they had such sentimental value I couldn’t bear to throw them out. Boy was I glad I hung on to them! I started working on my sister’s gift in October and finished it on Christmas morning.

The last gift she opened from me was a quilt made of my father’s favorite t-shirts. She absolutely loved it, marveling at a shirt from a concert they went to together, and one she had bought him twenty years ago that he refused to retire.

The quilt is a 6 foot by 4 foot piece of family history. Expensive? No. Just what she wanted? Yes.

It’s time for me to admit that I’m the slightly eccentric neighbor who puts her Christmas lights up before Thanksgiving. I can’t help it! I’m always seduced by the relatively warm November weather, and I think “Well, I’ll just put them up now, but I won’t light them!” But once they’re up, it seems like such a shame not to plug them in.

Anyway, these were our lights this year.

I like to have a different approach every year, so next year I may go with a red-and-green theme for the outdoor lights. Why am I thinking about that now, you ask? Well, silly, a woman always remembers the life lessons her mother taught her, and my mother taught me a very important one: after-Christmas sales.

I should have gone out this morning to hit the sales, but this was what happened here today. So I will go to Ace Hardware tomorrow with a song in my heart and a plan in mind for next year.

There are two things you need to know about me: I love Christmas, and I love math. (I also love my husband, who set up this website for me!)

Some may find it strange to launch a Christmas blog the day after Christmas, but it seems like perfect timing to me. For one thing, we only thought of the idea two days ago, and for another thing – well, excuse me but there’s only 364 days until Christmas 2011. People, we need to start getting ready.

I hope you will join me on this journey as I decorate, wrap, and craft in preparation for Christmas. Because when you love it like I do, it cannot be contained on the calendar between Thanksgiving and December 25^th. It’s a year-round affair.