We’ve always sent Paul’s sister Beth a Christmas gift, but now that Paul and Beth’s parents have both died, I feel more of a responsibility about it; she’s not married, she doesn’t have children, she lives far away from all family. I aim for a “Christmas in a box” feel, planning as if our box will be the only Christmas she gets (which is probably not the case, but it gives me the mindset I’m looking for). We used to spend on her about what we spent on my brother; now we spend approximately what we spend on my brother AND his family. Well…*does math*…brother + wife + one kid, something like that.

I remember when I was a child, I liked when the day after Christmas I had something new to wear, something to eat, something to read, and something to do. (If those rhymed I think I’d be suggesting an alternative for that something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read poem, which, like the something old/new/borrowed/blue poem, seems to me to have too much overlap.) So I look for that kind of assortment. I’d like to be able to do a better job than “things I know about her from Facebook,” but that’s what I’m working with. (Paul claims he doesn’t know her any better than that: he left home at 17 and never lived there again, and she was only 13 then; they’re not close, or even really in touch at all.) I know she likes cats and tattoos and coffee. I know she exercises a lot and is a vegetarian. Everything is still pretty much a shot in the dark: just because she likes something doesn’t mean she wants related products; if she DOES want related products, she might already have them. But again, we have to work with what we’ve got, so here’s what I did this year:

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Pen & Ink: Tattoos & the Stories Behind Them. I first discovered this at our library; it put me back in the mood to think seriously about a tattoo. I thought it was really good: a fun general interest book for almost anyone, but specifically nice for someone interested in tattoos, which she is. Each page is a drawing of someone’s tattoo with their story of why they chose it.

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Cat earrings. This is going to be one of those “Well, actually it was Wednesday at 2:00, not Tuesday at 1:00” explanations, where you will be clenching your teeth and wondering why on EARTH it MATTERS, but I keep nervously picturing her finding this post and thinking I got it wrong, so I will give the whole story. The earrings I WANTED to get her are the ones pictured above. She is single but interested in dating, and she likes cats, and she likes silver, so I thought they had a pleasing overall look. But I waited too long and they went out of stock, so I got her these instead: also silver, also cats, but no romance (unless those two cats are checking each other out across your face). But now the ones I DID get her are OUT of stock, and the ones I WANTED to get her are back IN stock, so I’m using THOSE for the post: they’re the ones I WOULD have suggested if I’d written the post during the decision-making process, instead of getting overwhelmed and writing about it in January.

The salt-tasting book, the same one I bought for the Yankee Swap. I kind of bought this for everyone this year: Beth, my parents, my brother and sister-in-law.

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See’s Reindeer Box. I did not buy this from Amazon; I bought this from See’s. But, oddly, See’s doesn’t have it on their site (that’s not the odd part) but Amazon does (that’s the odd part). This is a great candy box because it has a nice assortment (chocolate Santas, chocolate balls, candy-cane sticks, lollipops) and the box itself is surprisingly large (notice from the photo above that the picture on the box far exceeds the size of the candy-holding portion of the box). Plus, the reindeer is cute and festive and seems like the sort of thing my grandparents would have given me, and I’m going for a family vibe.

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Anna’s Ginger Thins. I didn’t buy these from Amazon for $11.50 but instead from the cookie section of my grocery store for I think $2-4. These seem festive to me. My grandparents used to get a Dutch version shaped like Santas, and so did Paul’s grandparents. Our grocery store has the Dutch ones (shaped like windmills instead of Santas), but they’re the store-brand and so visually they don’t hold up to the Anna’s: they look like Cheap Grocery Store Cookies instead of Gift Cookies. It’s a difficult decision. Maybe I should look harder next year for the Dutch Santas. Or maybe I can take the store-brand windmill cookies out of their package and put them in a pretty bag with a ribbon.

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Fancy Christmas teas. I found these at HomeGoods for $6.99. Festive and fancy: each teabag is in a little pyramid-shaped box. For some reason.

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Cat oven mitt and pot holder. These don’t look quite like the ones I found at HomeGoods, but they’re close.

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Starbucks cocoa. Again, bought not on Amazon for a silly price; the HomeGoods price of $6.99 seemed plenty high enough.

Other things we considered:

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Cat-a-day calendar. Some people are calendar people and some people are not, and also I didn’t want to overdo the cat thing.

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Pusheen book. I wish I’d gotten it for her LAST year; THIS year I was thinking she probably already has it.

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Charley Harper Cattitude note cards. Some people use stationery and some don’t, and I suspect she doesn’t; also, not wanting to overdo the cat thing.

Henry was a challenge to buy for this year. He had a list, but it was unusually full of There Is No Way We Are Buying You That ideas (itch powder, cleats for no reason, a giant globe because his friend has one and he likes to spin it). One repeat request from last year was “pizza out with parent,” which we did again this year. That’s fun and yummy for ME, too: I love pizza, and it’s fun to go with just one kid. Both years he’s redeemed the coupon at the very earliest possible meal (lunch on December 26th), and it’s a nice vacation thing to do.

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Another list item was Nerf gun. I’d sent Henry’s list to my parents, and my mother reported that my dad had immediately chosen that idea. She further reported that he’d been going to order two (“He needs TWO!”) and then at the last minute ordered THREE plus ALSO a refill pack of darts, and also was considering adding the idea to his own wish list. So “Gift Ideas for a 7-Year-Old Boy or Your Dad.” (Or my friend Surely’s co-workers.) This is a toy that has been in HEAVY use since Christmas. Yesterday evening there was a chorus of surprised screaming; it turned out that the three littles were playing, and Elizabeth had successfully ambushed her brothers. There are darts everywhere: I found one nestled in the branches of the Christmas tree, and several came through the laundry.

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Another list item was “squirt gun,” so my brother and sister-in-law bought him a Super Soaker. He’s been allowed to fire it into the tub for now, and is looking forward to summer.

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Electric blanket. Last year he was SO JEALOUS when Edward got an electric blanket and he didn’t. Electric blankets went on clearance after Christmas, so I waited until they were 50% off and then I bought one for him and set it aside. I’d thought about giving it to him for his birthday, but May is not the right time of year to fully appreciate an electric blanket, so I saved it for Christmas. (The picture shows two controllers, but the twin-size has one controller.)

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Christmas Craft Fun Play-Doh Set. The week before Christmas, I was looking at the list I’d kept of what we were giving the kids, and I noticed that Henry’s list had LESS—not only in total cost (which is sometimes relevant and sometimes not) but also in STUFFness. The day before Christmas Eve, I went out shopping with my mom hoping that something would seem like The Right Thing. This seemed good: cute Play-Doh projects that didn’t look too difficult. I also bought a 4-pack of basic Play-Doh (red/blue/yellow/white) because the tubs it came with seemed skimpy.

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Jar of gumballs. This is not the one I bought him. The one I bought him had fewer gumballs but they were assorted sizes, which I thought he’d like. This was one of his favorite Christmas presents.

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Lands’ End Octopus shirt. He saw this while I was shopping for the space-themed shirts for Edward, and went nuts for it. He’d also wondered if there could be anything as delightful as a shirt that was red AND black, so I bought him this one from Kohl’s and another one (not on the site anymore) on a good sale. I think it’s weird/neat when kids want something I would never ordinarily buy for them. I hadn’t realized red and black together weren’t my taste until he asked for that. I remember when I was little my mom’s style was dresses and corduroy jumpers and turtlenecks, and my style was pants and pink velour; this helped me buy the red and black shirts.

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Garfield book, a different one than Edward’s.

I’m extra stressed about flu this year. I read about the strains in the flu shot not being the right ones this time, and I thought, “Well…it’s okay. I mean, the flu is pretty awful but usually survivable unless, like, you have a compromised immune system.” Which is when I remembered that a compromised immune system is what Edward has now. Which is when I smacked my hands together briskly and remembered there is no point getting upset about things that COULD happen but HAVE NOT. Then I went on Facebook and saw most of my local friends have one illness or another going through their families, so then I sealed up the doors with deadbolts and duct tape and no one is going back to school or work.

Let’s talk about what Edward got for Christmas. He had one million ideas, which was good, but he kept changing them, and there were a lot of things I didn’t think he’d actually want/like, and also a lot of them were not sensible: for example, a video game so old it could only be bought used, and for over $100. So…no. One game he wanted had the worst reviews I’d ever seen for a game, but at least it was cheap ($12):

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Paul says Spore is in fact famously bad, a game that had huge build-up and no follow-through, and also is glitchy and incompatible with a lot of computers, and the company has abandoned it and no longer fixes things or does updates. So I was not going to buy this game, and I told Edward all about the problems and complaints, in the hopes that he would not want it anymore. But then about a week before Christmas, Edward said there were three things he wanted most for Christmas—and one of them was Spore. Well, FINE. We did indeed have a very hard time getting it to even run on my computer, and my dad had to bring over two different external disc drives before we could find a combination that didn’t spit out the disc. And it is indeed a very glitchy game, and luckily Edward has a bunch of other stuff to play with so he doesn’t play it often.

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Garfield Fat Cat 3-pack Volume 3. I like to get a fun book for each kid, and my favorite is if I can find books that several/all of the kids will want to read, so they can pass them around and I feel like I got double or triple or quintuple value out of it. We have a couple of Garfield books that Rob bought with a gift card back when he was about 9, and they are TATTERED with re-reading, so I got another one to add to the rotation.

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Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. Edward had a lot of video games on his list, and this was one of the most available and reasonably-priced ones ($22); also, Paul wanted to play it.

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It’s out of stock in his size now, but I got him this Lands’ End space-themed shirt. I also got him the midnight navy solar system one, which is now out of stock for boys but still in stock for girls (I wanted Elizabeth to want it, but she didn’t). I’d told the kids about that little want/need/wear/read gift-buying poem, and they were intrigued, and I liked the way it took some of the pressure off to make every gift a Big Wow Exciting one. So although I didn’t follow that poem, I did use it to prepare them to expect at least one clothing gift, which ended up being fun all around. I think knowing they would get one clothing gift made it a fun thing—like, Henry immediately got very excited about the idea of getting a red and black shirt if only such a marvelous combination existed, and Elizabeth said she really wanted a new sweater, and so forth. I think if there hadn’t been the concept of a Clothing Gift slot to fill, they wouldn’t have been excited about the clothes.

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An MP3 player is another of the three things Edward said he MOST wanted for Christmas—and coincidentally, was another of the things I wasn’t going to get him until he said that. I thought he was too young for it and wouldn’t use it, and that he’d lose it and/or put it through the laundry. And I might be right, but so far he really likes it. I suspected he wouldn’t like the earbud things that came with it, so I also bought him these headphones, which went on a lightning deal for something like $7 shortly before Christmas. I might get him a songs gift card for his birthday; in the meantime he has a few of my songs and a TON of Rob’s. (My music is apparently derpy. Rob’s is awesome.)

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Edward has wanted a Minecraft Papercraft set for ages, but I thought he’d find it frustrating. I was completely wrong: my brother and sister-in-law bought the deluxe set for him for Christmas, and he spent the next few days carefully and patiently putting it together. Quietly. All by himself. It was delightful. Also, the pieces were a LOT bigger and nicer than I’d expected. For some reason I was imagining they’d be cubes about an inch on each side, and that’s true of the blocks that make up the characters; but the wood/stone/ground blocks are more like 2.5 inches each side. The tree at its widest point is over 7 inches.

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Our library has a puppet theater and puppets, and Edward loves them, particularly this hedgehog one. He asked the librarian where they’d gotten it, and she said from a library-supplies catalog. I looked online to see if by any chance I could find it, and hooray, Amazon had it. My parents bought it for him for Christmas, along with the mini owl (which today is showing as over $35 but was not at the time—all the puppets were in the $7-14 range, I think), the little cat, the bee, and the emperor penguin.

William is 13, and I don’t think there’s any avoiding the Gift Letdown thing that happens sometime around that age. Little kids want TOYS and they’re so EXCITED and HAPPY. Older kids can find there isn’t really anything they want, and if they DO think of things they want, those things aren’t as exciting as they remembered Christmas gifts being. It’s a problem. I combat it by talking about it all the time, until it’s possible I’m making it happen by discussing it.

Anyway, as we got closer to Christmas, William did manage to put together a list. I jumped on any idea that seemed like it was something to PLAY with, but a lot of his gifts were more like what an adult might ask for.

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Kinetic sand. Paul texted me from a craft store, saying William was riveted by a kinetic sand display. I looked into a few nice-looking kits with names like KrayZSand that came with trays and molds and so forth, but the reviews were poor: people were saying things like “Just get the real kinetic sand.” So I got what I hope was “the real” kinetic sand. Reviewers also mentioned helpfully that it was necessary to have a lap-sized sandbox if you wanted to PLAY with the kinetic sand, so I went to Target and bought a flattish $7-ish lap-sized 11×14-inch Sterilite bin with a snap-on-with-tabs lid (it looks like the shallower bins shown here, if you work better from a visual), so that the sand could be played with and also CAREFULLY-STORED-please-don’t-spill-this-all-over-the-house. This stuff is really cool and also definitely a TOY type thing. It would be a good gift for an adult, too. Two pounds, by the way, is not a huge quantity. Picture a one-pound box of brown sugar; now picture two.

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Water pearls / polymer beads. They’re tiny little hard plastic balls, and when you put them in water they expand to many times their original size: like, from the size of a small stud earring to the size of a small gumball. As they dry out, they shrink back down. William got these from Christmas last year or the year before, when I didn’t realize the things he’d seen on a cool YouTube science video were THE SAME THING as vase-filling water pearls, so I paid about four times the price for about 1/100th the quantity. Well, they were fun anyway, and at the time William was a little starry-eyed about Steve Spangler so it was probably worth it to get the branded ones, and actually now that I’ve bought HUGE GIANT CHEAP BAGS of the non-branded kind, I’m a little wishing we didn’t have so MANY. There’s one thing in the question section where someone says “How many beads does it make?” and someone replies, “I don’t really know, but I used a 5-gallon bucket and they overflowed all over the floor.” So, like, don’t make them all at once. Just a few at a time. Anyway, I got him a bag each of clear and assorted colored. They are less of a hit this time (the novelty has worn off somewhat), but still something to play with.

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Pusheen t-shirt. We are very fond of Pusheen around here, and this shirt happens to say the same thing William says when I ask him to unload the dishwasher.

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Spanish stuff. You guys helped me with this! I found the recommendations SO INTERESTING to read, and came away with that happy “the internet is people, and people are GREAT” feeling I always get when I ask a question thinking I’ll be lucky if one person knows, and instead there are dozens and dozens who know. We all have such unplumbed depths, don’t we? So many skills the others don’t even know about!

Where was I? Oh yes! So what I finally did was, I went with what his Spanish teacher recommended, because it sounded like there was nothing that was exactly what he was asking for, and there were a lot of people who added support to her recommendations, and it took away the issue of “Is it the same kind of Spanish he’s learning in school?” and so forth. Then I added two more things. So altogether I bought Merriam-Webster’s Spanish-English Dictionary, Barron’s 501 Spanish Verbs, a pocket-sized Merriam-Webster because I could picture him liking to keep that in his backpack, and a Spanish Word-a-Day calendar. I didn’t count all these against his gift budget, because frankly if he’d asked for any of the first three to help him in school I would have just bought them for him. If he sustains his interest, my plan is to add some of the other dictionaries/books people mentioned, because what I noticed is that a lot of the Spanish experts were saying they liked to have an assortment of dictionaries for different purposes and for getting different perspectives on a particular word, and that is how I would feel about it too.

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Sign language stuff. William is in the sign language club at school, and asked for some sign language dictionaries. My mom was an elementary school teacher and used sign language a lot for songs and programs, so I asked for her input—and ended up sitting at the table surrounded by books, hearing a careful run-down of the pros and cons of every single one. I finally chose the two that appealed to me the most while seeming the most generally useful: Signing: How to Speak with Your Hands, and The American Sign Language Phrase Book. The first one has been updated over the years, but the pictures are still drawings from the ’70s: turtlenecks, poofy hair on the men, etc. The second one has more cartoony/amusing drawings. The first one is more word-by-word, the second one is phrases.

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Sonic screwdrivers. My parents got these for him: the 10th and the 12th. We’ve had some bad luck with Dr. Who toys in the past, but William said, “I know these will probably break, but I want them anyway.” He’s in the Dr. Who Fan Club, and said he’d want them as costume props even if they stopped flashing and making noise. So far they are still flashing and making noise.

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Leatherman tool. I think this was the model he got, but I’m not sure; there are a bunch of different ones. This was my brother’s idea for him. William likes to take stuff apart, and Paul imitated him using his teeth and/or breaking Paul’s pocket knife on a flea market find in the car on the way home. The Leatherman has things like pliers and wire cutters and screwdrivers.

What do people do when they don’t have blogs where they can post their Big Upsetting Things and have other people kindly and efficiently dispose of all the upset feelings? When I compare the way I would have felt this morning with the way I DO feel this morning, I can hardly believe it. Really, thank you so much for talking me down. The whole comments section gave me excessive eye-watering.

Well! I suggest we talk about PRESENTS. I was worried to discuss them before Christmas, because I don’t really know if the children snoop my blog or not—PROBABLY not, but MAYBE. Also, in some years I’ve had a lot of fun doing gift posts, and this year for whatever reason it just didn’t seem fun, and also I put off the gift-buying later than usual. But NOW it seems fun. And I’ll tag them as gift ideas, and then maybe later I’ll get around to…organizing them…somehow…so they can be used in later years. Let’s not think about that right now.

Today I will work on Elizabeth’s presents, because I am most in the mood to talk about those. This year Elizabeth developed a sudden and surprising interest in walruses in addition to her abiding interest in cats, so you will notice a certain THEME to her gifts.

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Melissa and Doug Plush Walrus. When Elizabeth first discovered this gigantic walrus (30 inches nose to back flipper), I told her it was out of the question. First, I said, 30 inches was not as big as she was picturing (she wanted to use him as a backrest). Second, he cost over $100 on Amazon, plus more for shipping, plus he had a red warning that said he might not arrive in time for Christmas. Third, she has a tiny bedroom that is already PACK-CRAMMED with stuffed animals. No: too expensive, too risky, too big, not big enough, too many stuffed animals already. No.

Which is why it was so much fun to surprise her with it. I found another one for $65 with free shipping guaranteed in time for Christmas. I emailed Paul about it first: Are we seriously going to add a(nother) giant stuffed animal to the house. “Yes,” he replied. It is the hit of Christmas, and so soft and snuggly, and cuter than it looked in its picture. She has been carrying it with her everywhere, and it is definitely big enough to be a backrest.

This, by the way, is the best ever walrus for a REGULAR-sized walrus: Wild Republic Cuddlekins Walrus. I bought one a couple of years ago for Henry and kept snuggling it myself. If I can’t find it soon (WHERE COULD IT BE? could I have gotten rid of it in a fit of purge-cleaning?), I’m going to have to buy another.

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Cats in Sweaters calendar. I am a little annoyed to see it is now half off, but it also says it is “temporarily out of stock,” and in my past experience with Amazon and “temporarily out of stock” calendars, that means several emails in January asking me to confirm I still want it, and then an email in February apologizing that the order has to be canceled. We also got her a cat sweater from Gymboree, which I would link to but it’s no longer on their site.

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Walrus Cross-stitch Kit. My sister-in-law really rose to the walrus challenge, and she’s the one who found and bought this for Elizabeth. It has started a cross-stitch craze at our house. William: “Cross-stitch is like PIXELS!” Today I have agreed to take them to the store, where I believe we will be buying one each of every single embroidery floss color available.

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Walrus books! She’d gotten a bunch from the library, but was saying she wished they were HERS and she could KEEP them. I chose Walruses of the Arctic, Walruses, and a used copy of Nature’s Children: Walrus (which has a much nicer cover than the stand-in shown in the listing, but our copy was Walrus AND Hawk, which was a little odd/disappointing).

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Webkinz orca. One of the reasons I put off gift-buying rather late this year is that I wanted to avoid buying things in September that they would no longer want in December. I mostly succeeded—but I bought this in September on a good sale when she was on a Webkinz whale craze and wanted an orca; by the time I gave it to her at Christmas, whales AND Webkinz were yesterday’s news. Oh well. Five dollars.

Poster-size photo collage of her cat. This cat is her dearest love. I believe if she could save only one family member, it would be this cat. SHE READS STORIES TO IT. Anyway, I chose a bunch of pictures of the cat and made a 20×30 poster photo collage on Snapfish. It was supposed to cost over $20 plus shipping, but during checkout there was a pop-up window that offered me 60% off, so I got it for $8-something plus shipping.

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Subscription to Cat Fancy. This was from my parents, along with a cat harness/leash because she wants to train her cat to go on walks with her. She doesn’t read the articles, she just likes the pictures. She cuts them out and puts them up all over her room. There’s also a monthly centerfold poster.

More on gifts later. Probably.