'Twas the night before Christmas

Nearly done. Nearly done. I've been saying that for days now, and yet every time I think I've gone for the last round of procuring, I discover that while I may be closer to achieving the elusive "done" than I was the day before, I'm not really anywhere close. :::sigh:::

The spousal unit's gift was easy, as was shopping for elder daughter. Mom's is done, grandmother's is done, friends' are done. It's the twins that present the issues. They have at least a kajillion toys scattered all over the house in various states of completeness, and bringing more into the house just because it's Christmas seems something of a travesty, a bad joke. I came of age in the 80s, that blissful era of conspicuous consumption, but there seems something very wrong with allowing my children to get and get and get ... and then get more. If I could just get them to take care of what they've got, it might be different, but until that happens ...

So I think this year, instead of mountains of boxes wrapped under the tree, they'll get maybe one or two more gifts from Dad and Mum (your friendly blonde stood in line for a Wii, and that counts as one big'un), and then we'll start a special new tradition. I think we'll do one of those child-sponsor things, and maybe they'll expand on the social responsibility that we nudged them into at Halloween (rather than having monstrous bucketfuls of candy - which typically results in wrappers and chocolate smears in places where they shouldn't be - we trick-or-treated for UNICEF ... and bless whoever put UNICEF commercials on Cartoon Network or the Disney Channel where the little monsters could see them).

With that in mind, though, I've still got tons to do. My in-laws live something like 5000 miles away, so I am tasked each year with purchasing birthday and Christmas gifts and tagging them as being from the grandparents. That remains to be done, along with the baking of cookies (chocolate chip for Santa, decorated sugar for the extended-family do) and the preparing of the Christmas Dinner menu. (I'm not scared of roasting a turkey any longer, but I took the easy way out for this little festival and bought a smoked tom that only wants thawing and heating ... it's the side dishes that are going to take time that I really haven't got.)

So then it boils down to logistics. The mall and the big-box kids are all going to slam shut at six o'clock this evening (presumably with a great sigh of relief tempered with trepidation over the masses that will jam the parking lots on Tuesday), so I've got to map out this final round of fetching very carefully in order to maximize my acquisition prospects. The spousal unit has also chosen today to propose that "we" go shopping for my gift. (I swear I'm going to design a new family crest bearing the motto "Never do today what you can put off for six weeks"!)

Here goes ...