Christmas gifts bought, wrapped and shipped. I wasn't going to buy any at ALL--we had a talk a few years ago and I thought we'd settled on "no more gifts". None of us need anything, none of us knows what the others are into, none of us are billionaires (or millionaires or even hundred-thousand-aires) and it's a pain to ship presents (not to mention expensive). But gift giving is Sis' love language, and I cannot quite let go of Mom's rule that if you get a gift (or a card), you must reciprocate. So yesterday afternoon after work, I was out at a half dozen stores panic-shopping and not being very happy about it. But I AM pretty proud that I found quite a few things (seriously, I had one gift. For five people.), came home, wrapped everything, somehow managed to snag the exact right size box from the recycle bin in town* and got the box to UPS today around 2:00. Bless them, they were busy but super efficient, and the long wait I anticipated--worrying that I would be late for my 2:30 shift tonight--didn't happen.
* our local "recycle park" has a shed where you can drop off broken down boxes. The town then sorts them and stores them by size, and anyone can go grab a box when needed. When I worked at the bindery, there were boxes galore, and I never had to worry about not having a box for shipping gifts. The job after that, boxes were scarce and often either too big or too dirty. I could've gotten a box at work but it also would've been too big...plus I didn't know early enough that I was going to need one.
