And so the present wrapping saga begins.

I don’t mind wrapping one or two items on any given day, but I detest spending hours on end wrapping everything under the sun. I think I drew the line at stocking stuffers last year, and straight up refused to gift wrap shampoo bottles, tooth paste and hair brushes and the like. Way too much work. Sounds curmudgeonly, I get that, but by the week before Christmas my kids have my nerves frazzled. So this year, I am formulating a new game plan to alleviate much of what I don’t like. Smaller doses of wrapping, spread out over a whole month. 30 days until the big man makes his early morning debut.

We are using more and more gift bags as I get older and more ornery. Rather than leaving the whole lot for one night, I think I’m going to schedule just a few minutes every day to wrap one or two things. I also detest the asymmetrical, non standard box shapes for all of these toys nowadays. Give me flat surfaces, 90° corners, and fewer compound curves. Not that I want my wrapped gifts to look rigid and over tailored, but crinkled edges, and bunching isn’t my bag man. Not that the kids care. Like, at all. So, I don’t really know why I concern myself with it so much.

I’m trying to get into the holiday mood, and it’s increasingly becoming more difficult to do so. The tree is up, decorated and lit. The exterior lights are up and illuminated nightly. There is a new light up wreath & bow on the door. That’s about the most of it until the kids get older, and we start to lose more of the toys that clutter the house. We sat down to watch Elf as a family, and later on I sat down to Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Still not feeling it. Maybe I need a movie marathon with Scrooged, NL Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, Gremlins & Home Alone to really drive it home. The presence of snow really does help it feel like Christmas. That and music. I miss the yellow LP my folks used to play on endless repeat. I have a photo of it somewhere. Ah yes, here it is:

Hard to over state exactly how much of my memories of Christmas is entwined with this old vinyl LP. I did scour iTunes to locate some of the songs individually, but it isn’t the same recordings, or we had our record player set differently… either way, it’s close, but not the same.