I was trying to choose a page-a-day calendar, and I ended up buying one that wasn’t even on the list: Effin’ Birds page-a-day calendar. And it turns out I don’t really like it. I’d seen Effin’ Birds images as memes around the internet and had found them funny, but in a page-a-day desk calendar it’s bringing me down. Like, this weekend’s message was “could you shut the f*** up before i die,” which seems less snappy/irreverent and more depressed/mean. Today’s is better (“feel free to leave me out of your bullsh*t”), but I am still shopping for a new calendar. Bright side: most of them are 50% off now! And the longer I dither, the cheaper they get!

Rob’s birthday is very close to Christmas, and this was the first one since his birth that he’s been away from us. The day I was going to be shipping his birthday box (I was waiting for one last-second item that was due to arrive mid-day), I was at the grocery store and I impulsively bought a cake. I had previously considered various cake options, but they all seemed unworkable: I could bake a cake, but there was no way I could successfully package or ship it, and anyway I doubted it would be much good to eat a few days after baking; I could have a cake delivered to him, but the prices for that were astonishing; I could send him a cake mix and a can of frosting, but I didn’t know if he had oil and eggs and cake pans—and it seemed like a collection of Can’t Make It Into Cake elements would be worse than No Cake At All.

But then on the way to the produce section my eye fell on the Entenmann’s display. Those cakes are made to be hold up to a fair amount of slinging-around before they’re sold, and they appeared to be approximately the size of the medium flat-rate box I was planning to use. And they were marked “Best by January 17th,” so Entenmann’s expected them to still taste good TWO WEEKS after the day I would be buying/shipping it. And they were about $7, so I figured even if I shipped one and it was a failure, it was still worth trying for the fun experiment of it and for the symbolic intent of it. And I even got a little test-run of my idea, because the cake fell out of a tipped-over shopping bag on the way home, and it landed upside-down, and there was no consequence: the cake did not come out of its pan, the frosting did not stick to the lid, etc.

And it was apparently a success! Rob said it was particularly amusing to open a box and start taking out presents and find an unexpected CAKE underneath; and also he said he’d just been talking with a friend earlier that day, and had mentioned that he hadn’t thought about a birthday cake until it was too late, so he’d been planning to make do with banana bread. Which is AT LEAST as grim as any bashed-up icing-stuck-to-lid cake I could have sent! (No no—banana bread isn’t grim, it’s DELICIOUS. But as an alternative to birthday cake, on a person’s first independent grown-up birthday away from their parents, chosen ONLY because the person didn’t realize in time that they would need to figure out their own birthday cake—well then it’s grim.)

The one thing I wished I’d thought to include: CANDLES. That would have been so easy, and not expensive! Well, but does he have matches? Probably not. I have a bunch of those cute wee little boxes of matches, but I am NOT AT ALL SURE about sending those through the mail, and my guess is that the answer to any such question posed to the post office would be a gigantic panicked hands-waving-wildly NO. Plus, WOULD he put the candles into the cake, light them, and blow them out, all alone? I am guessing also no. And in fact I feel a little dismal, thinking of it, so now I am glad/relieved I didn’t send the candles. Whew! Close call!

I have one resolution this year, and it’s to get a tattoo. I’ve waffled long enough.

Some progress I’ve already made over the past few years is to find the tattoo artist I want. This was no small task. Any time I saw anyone with a tattoo I liked, I’d ask where they’d gotten it done, and I kept a list. I have a preference for a non-male artist, though I was willing to be flexible on that; but also I want flowers, and a lot of times I’d be looking through an artist’s portfolio and it would be all, like, skulls and snakes and SpongeBob. It’s hard to tell from that how they’d do with the nice pretty flowers I wanted.

Then one of my co-workers came in with some new flower tattoos of exactly the sort I was looking for, and it turns out the artist SPECIALIZES in the realistic flower tattoos I like. And also she is so booked up, she is not even adding to her waiting list anymore. If, however, you are on her email list, she will email when she has cancellations; I don’t know how likely it is to get one of those appointments because I haven’t yet tried, because I’m not yet ready. I am still dithering. I am dithering about LOCATION and I am dithering about ART. I wonder if you would want to discuss this.

For LOCATION I am considering:
• side of calf
• upper arm / shoulder cap

For ART I am considering:
• rose
• peony
• tulip

The main issue for location is this: if I love having a tattoo and I want MORE of them, what I would want would be an entire bouquet on my upper arm and up/over/around the shoulder. But I don’t want to START with that, because that’s wildly ambitious and time-consuming and expensive for something I don’t even know if I’ll like. If I started with one single flower on my upper arm / shoulder cap, it would have to be with the ability to expand it into a bouquet, and that means compromising the design, both of the flower and of the bouquet.

So I could instead do one flower on the side of my calf. I don’t have any grand plans for the calf. And I have seen some cute tattoos where there’s, say, a tulip that starts at the ankle, like it’s growing out of your sock; I don’t know that I want that much whimsy, but it’s an option. Or I like the idea of a big rose or peony there, NOT seeming to grow out of the sock. And so the calf seems like the perfect solution—except that when I think of it, I feel some disappointment that it’s not my upper arm / shoulder cap.

I have to tell you that it only just now occurred to me as I was writing this that I have TWO shoulders/upper-arms. I could get a tattoo on ONE of them now, and then if I love it do the big grand project on the OTHER one. This changes everything: TWO arms! I have TWO!!

The main issue for the art is this: it’s hard to decide, when I love all the options. The rose is so classic it’s cliché, but that’s one of the things I like about it: it’s a TATTOO-tattoo. Plus, roses are the kind of thing where conceptually I roll my eyes, but then I see a real rose and you guys have you LOOKED AT A ROSE THEY ARE SO BEAUTIFUL. Peonies are also gorgeous, and have a similar vibe to a rose while not being a rose, and if I want whimsy I can add a darling round little peony bud. And I love tulips, and I’m predominantly Dutch so that’s pleasing too. A tulip is not as great as a bouquet-starter, but would be perfect for the side of the calf, especially with that nice stem; and I could do TWO tulips, which I think makes it a little less whimsical than just one straight tulip growing right up the calf.

Based on how I feel when I imagine deciding on each flower in turn, I think the most likely is peony on upper arm (ONE of my upper arms!) and second most likely is tulip(s) on calf. I would be very interested to hear YOUR tattoo thoughts—for my tattoos, of course, but even more for your own if you are planning one.

I am not panicking, but today I went to the grocery store, and I was first alerted to The Egg Issue because the entire egg section was filled exclusively with the cheapest store-brand white-shelled eggs. We usually buy the ones where the government has certified that the chickens are kissed on the forehead each night before being sung to sleep in their roomy apartments, so I admit I had a moment where I thought it would be nice to have the excuse to buy the cheap eggs: the petted-chicken eggs used to be $3.29/dozen but recently have been more like $4.39/dozen. But then I noticed that NO, the cheap store-brand eggs were $5.99/dozen!! I thought I must be mistaken—looking at the wrong tag or something. I WAS NOT MISTAKEN. The cheap, large, store-brand eggs were $5.99; the jumbo size were $7.99.

On the way home I heard that the avian flu is a big huge deal right now. I had not bought any eggs, because I was hoping the price was a brief weird thing, but this might not be a brief weird thing. For a moment I wished we had gotten chickens as we have a few times considered doing, but then the news story went on to talk about how chicken-owners need to take precautions and be prepared to have their flocks put down, and I was grateful I only needed to think about the price of eggs.

As long as I am talking about bad news, I have some sad-but-expected cat news: we had to make The Decision about Elizabeth’s Dear Sad-Boy Cat, the one with recurring kidney stones, IBS, and cat laryngitis that turned out to be likely lung cancer. In November I wrote he seemed to have unexpectedly rallied, but then later that month he started losing weight again. He started sometimes missing his footing on a jump, which was alarming. He had a regular annual check-up already scheduled with the vet, so I took him to that, but said to the tech who was doing his little intake interview that I doubted we would be doing his usual senior bloodwork and so forth, but would instead be having The Talk.

And that was indeed the case. The weird pupils, which had turned into weird pupils plus a strange-but-not-gross brownish patch on his iris, turned out to be evidence of the cancer having metastasized to his brain. The missing-his-footing-on-a-jump could be weakness from not eating much, or could be the tumor messing with his brain, or could be the tumor messing with his eyesight, or could be a combination of those things. The vet said if we were emotionally ready she could put him down that very day, or she could buy him maybe a week or two. We asked if he was suffering, and she said she believed he was not—and that if she HAD thought he was suffering, she would not have offered to buy him more time. I consulted with Elizabeth, and we opted to buy him maybe a week or two. This involved first a sort of barrage of treatments to see if we could make him feel well enough to eat better: subcutaneous fluids with vitamins; an anti-nauseant; an appetite stimulant; and an increase in the dose of the steroids he already takes. The vet also said that at this stage it didn’t matter WHAT he ate, as much as it mattered THAT he ate, so we were to give him what he wanted; so I went to the store and bought pretty much one each of every single product marketed to owners of fluffy white cats eating out of crystal dishes.

It did buy him nearly two weeks, though toward the end I was wondering every day if we might have to make an expensive and traumatic trip to the emergency vet. I would have opted to put him down the Friday a week and a half after his The Talk appointment, but Elizabeth asked for the following Monday so she could have the weekend with him, and I double-checked with the vet who said that was not unreasonable (but also gave us a list of local agencies that would do emergency euthanasia). And he did make it to Monday. Elizabeth and I brought him in. It was very sad, but also a relief to have things ending peacefully and before he was suffering, and without an emergency.

Now we are down to two cats. One of them, a smart bossy mean orange-and-white queen, does not seem to notice that we are missing a cat—or if she does notice, she’s glad (she didn’t like that cat). The other of them, a classic sweet-‘n’-dippy orange male, has been wandering the house meowing and acting weird, and being snuggly; the girl cat has finally relented and allowed him to snuggle with her sometimes on the couch, which seems to be helping somewhat.

This year I felt like I took on board two absolutely obvious Christmas lessons that apparently I have to keep learning again and again:

1. Christmas doesn’t always have to be the same. What seems DELIGHTFUL and IMPORTANT one year can be totally different than what seems delightful and important the next year.

2. It’s a good idea to have a few little good-for-anyone gifts around.

I kept feeling like Something Was Wrong because we weren’t watching as many Christmas movies, or because this year I couldn’t find A Book for Each Stocking the way I have in the past—but we don’t have to do it the same every year, and in fact if the past few years have taught me anything it’s that FLEXIBILITY IS VALUABLE: if it isn’t a set-in-stone tradition that we absolutely must have chocolate oranges every year, then it is not so upsetting if chocolate oranges are not available. And just in general: there is no reason to waste time and effort and money on things we don’t even want, just because we used to want them, or think we ought to want them.

You can do new-Christmas-pajamas-on-Christmas-Eve OCCASIONALLY if you want: it doesn’t have to be EVERY SINGLE YEAR until every bureau drawer in the house is filled with nothing but Christmas pajamas. You can do an expensive and work-intensive customized advent calendar ONCE if you want, or ONLY when you have the time/inspiration, and do $2 cheap-chocolate-a-day calendars on other years. You can set up a card table and put out a Christmas puzzle just on the years when you feel like it. You can buy books only for the kids who like books, without having to make everyone’s presents match, or make everyone’s presents fit a little rhyme. You can buy tickets for an expensive Christmas performance ONCE, without having to do it every single year. Etc.

And you can do it this way EVEN IF other people in your household express disappointment that you are not putting in all the time and money and effort to make these things happen for them every single year! You can say merrily “Oh, yes, wasn’t that fun, the year we did that? Maybe we’ll do that again another year!” Or, if you are speaking to another adult in your household, you can say merrily “Oh, yes, wasn’t that fun? It’s not on my to-do list for this year, but you can go ahead if you think it would be fun to do again!”

As for the supply of little general-purpose gifties, this wasn’t something I would have done in our poorer years, because I think it only works if you’re fine with having some of the things unused. But this year by accident I overbought and/or overreceived a few things that happened to be perfect for this: a box of chocolate-covered mint marshmallows from Trader Joe’s; a bag of Lindt truffles; extra candy and extra individual Milano cookie packets from the stockings. I had put those things aside in a bag to Figure Out What To Do With Later. Also into the Figure Out Later bag I’d dropped some miscellaneous things: the too-pretty-to-throw-out-OR-ARE-THEY? golden net bags the Trader Joe’s chocolate coins came in; some pretty tissue paper from received gift bags; etc.

So then when I was putting out the gift card for the mail carrier, my eye fell upon the Figure Out Later bag and I added one of the little pretty golden net bags filled with a packet of Milano cookies and some of the Lindt truffles and extra stocking candy. And when I was putting together the gift bag for my workplace Secret Santa assignment, I added a handful of Lindt truffles just for flair. It didn’t feel NECESSARY in any way, so it’s not something I’d recommend if money is tight; but it did feel FESTIVE and FUN. (And, if money IS tight, I’ll mention that about half of my Figure Out Later bag was made up of things I was given / couldn’t use, and things-that-came-free-with-other-things like the Trader Joe’s coin bags, and things that were extra after I divided things up for stockings.)

If you have any shopping left in you, and would like to order yourself a nice little package to arrive after Christmas, may I strongly recommend these wee snowflake plates and wee snowflake bowls? They look so bland in their listing, but I am finding them hugely pleasing in usage—and I am happy to think of being able to continue to use them as Winter Dishes even after I put the Christmas Dishes away (always a sad day).

(image from Target.com)

(image from Target.com)

They are quite small. The bowls are like the berry bowls from my grandmother’s china set; do china sets still have berry bowls? You might use them for a side of jello salad, or for M&Ms, or for giving your kids some cut-up fruit. The plates are the size called “appetizer.” We use them for a couple of cookies, or for a square of cake, or for a dinner roll and some butter.

Anyway I just love them and I use them all the time. I normally tend toward bright!! colorful!! things, and these non-bright non-colorful dishes are making me doubt all my decisions. The way the glaze has settled into the embossed designs does something soothing to my brain. I wish there were a matching mug.

I will warn you that my first order of bowls arrived broken. Target immediately replaced them, and the second set arrived fine—but if you feel you might not be emotionally up to receiving a box of broken ceramic in January, and then perhaps finding out they’re sold out and there will be no replacement, well, it’s something to take into account.

I was thinking maybe next year I’d track all the hours I spent shopping for and wrapping presents, writing and sending Christmas cards, etc. Almost immediately I thought NO LET’S NOT. First of all: probably we don’t wish to know, especially if we might then be tempted to tally up the hours spent on Christmas preparation by the OTHER adult member of the household. Second of all: a large portion of it is HAPPY BUSYNESS, and we do not make a tally of our happy busyness as if it were a work timesheet. This is also why I don’t want my phone telling me how many hours I spent playing Love Nikki Dress-Up Queen this year.

But gosh it is a lot of time and a lot of aforethought. I didn’t have work today, and I DO have work tomorrow, Friday, and Christmas Eve, so after the kids were off to school I went directly to the grocery store, where I did our last Big Shop before Christmas; I’ll do one more small run-in probably on Friday, maybe Saturday, but I want that to be brisk and Essentials Only. Then I came home and wrapped presents. This involved NUMEROUS side-quests of various kinds: writing explanatory notes to go with a couple of peculiar gifts (I got someone the Ennui Duck); wrapping a candy bar with a print-out of the item that is arriving late; opening more packages that arrived while I was wrapping. I also sorted all the stocking stuff into piles, and then bagged them so they’ll be ready for putting into stockings.

The main issue this year, I think, is that I took on a LOT more fun Christmas activities all at once, most of them gift-related (a workplace Secret Santa; workplace Yankee Swap; little co-worker gift bags; items for a local gift drive; etc.), and I would definitely want to do all those things again next year, because they were all exactly the kind of fun I like—but I need to make sure I budget the extra time and energy for them, because this year I did not, and there were several moments where I experienced fleeting feelings that were not entirely festive.

Well. OVERALL it HAS been festive if a little frantic, and now that I am in the last eddying whirls of preparation, I am starting to have more time to enjoy reading Christmas stories by the light of the Christmas tree; gazing appreciatively at the Christmas cards up on the wall around a door frame; gazing appreciatively at the Christmas ornaments; making sure I have used all of my Christmas mugs at least once.

Christmas card update: BY FAR the most cards arrived yesterday, the 16th. I now have a nice border around part of a doorway.

Some Christmases involve a lot of quiet reading of Christmas books by the lovely light of the Christmas tree, and other Christmases involve roadrunner legs spinning somewhat less than merrily, and for me this Christmas has been one of the latter kind. I am trying to enjoy it for what it is, instead of feeling as if Christmas is not as good and/or will always be like this. This year maybe it’s hard to fit in the lovely-light readings of the Christmas books; so what? Next year those books will be fresher for having had a rest year. This year maybe I didn’t do much baking; so what? Other years have been big baking years, and that was fun but it doesn’t have to be like that every single year. This year maybe we haven’t watched as many Christmas movies; so what? Last year we watched a ton of them, so maybe last year was a Christmas-Movie Christmas and this one just isn’t, and that’s fine! A few things are arriving late, so I will have to wrap little slips of paper. Who cares? So what? Christmas is not ruined! It’s fine!

This year maybe I’ve had to pay the Christmas Tax a few times: spending more for gifts/shipping because I put things off too long and then needed to fix it with money. So what? Most years I don’t have to do that; most years I save money on sales and deals; most years I ship in plenty of time. The money saved those years helps cover this year.

This year I dropped the ball a couple of times, or else a shipper did, and I had to make silly inefficient drives just to get one single thing—like driving 40 minutes each way to buy a gift card in person, because I’d ordered it online on November 20th and it still hadn’t arrived or even shipped, and the online retailer was like “Huh, weird!” and their only proposed solution was to give me a refund. But listen, it got FIXED! It may have been silly, it may have been a waste of time, it may have been frustrating—but now it’s DONE and I have the gift card.

This year I made more than the usual number of decisions to do things in a non-preferred way, in order to save time and/or mental energy. Normally I prefer to spend a lot of time carefully choosing gifts for Paul’s sister, and then have them shipped here so I can wrap them festively and tuck them into a box with little festive treats tucked into the gaps. This year I opted to have some less-personally-chosen things shipped directly, because I couldn’t seem to get it together, and because I was feeling stressed about it instead of the usual excited. That’s fine! It’s fine! I cared a little to miss out on doing that, but I didn’t care a LOT, and if she cares at all she probably doesn’t care a lot either; and the relief of crossing that entire set of tasks (ordering! wrapping! box-finding! festive-treat-tucking! taking the whole thing to UPS and standing in line!) off of my To Do list was considerable.

And so on. I am trying to focus on the things I am Getting!! Done!!, because that’s a good feeling, and better than the feeling that I am LATE, I’m LATE, it’s all so LATE!! Today I mailed Rob’s Christmas box, which was not as extensive a box as I’d planned, and was more expensive than I’d intended because one of the items was on the bulky side; but that’s okay because Done is better than Perfect, and because probably the relative simplicity is what he would in fact prefer, and because larger things just cost more to ship and that’s all there is to it. If it doesn’t get there by Christmas I will be very, very stressed and sorry, but let’s just focus on the fact that NOW it is out of my hands and on its way. Also, I had some other miscellaneous stocking things shipped directly, so at least he’ll have THOSE. And probably the package WILL arrive in time.

WALL CALENDAR TIME.

It is a much shorter post this year. I think it must be that fewer and fewer people use wall calendars, so there are fewer options: I kept getting search results that looked good but turned out to be calendars from previous years. And I find I am more willing, at least this year, to Pick Something without spending as much time on it.

(image from Amazon.com)

Esté MacLeode calendar. I saw that there was a new one of these, and if I hadn’t had this post to write, I probably would have just put it in the cart and checked out. It was a few years ago that I dithered too long and missed it, and two years ago that I bought one, and I would be really happy having one by this artist again. Just nice and cheery and pretty.

(image from Amazon.com)

Feline calendar (Terry Runyan). This is another one I’ve had before and could be happy just re-buying.

(image from Amazon.com)

Redouté calendar. I consider this one each year. This year’s images would go particularly well with (1) the color of my kitchen walls and (2) my resolution for the new year to finally choose a botanical tattoo and actually acquire it.

(image from Amazon.com)

Art Deco Fairytales calendar. This is more emotional intensity than I want first thing in the morning in the kitchen with my coffee, but it caught my eye.

(image from Amazon.com)

Nathalie L’ete Woodland Dreams calendar. I LOVE THIS. I LOVE THIS. I LOVE EVERY SINGLE THING ABOUT THIS (except maybe September; what is happening with September) and was in fact about to go ahead and buy it before even finishing this post—but I double-checked the squares, and they’re less than half of the calendar. I really, really need the squares space.

(image from Amazon.com)

Floral Ink calendar. This seems refreshingly simple, and restful for the eyes.

(image from Amazon.com)

Joyful Landscapes calendar. I was braced for cheesy, and/or perky sayings, but it looks pretty and colorful.

(image from Amazon.com)

Klimt landscapes calendar. I had this one for 2022; I don’t want it a second year in a row, but would consider again another year. It was pleasing to look at. A lot of green.

(image from Amazon.com)

This Is My Bookstore calendar. I need a better look at some sample pages.

(image from Amazon.com)

Cats and Books calendar. This is relevant to my interests. I wish they hadn’t sacrificed square-size to make the name of the month so huge: I (usually) KNOW what MONTH it is.

As usual, I would be interested to know what YOU are going with for a wall calendar this year, if you use a wall calendar.

Elizabeth has “page-a-day calendar” on her Christmas wish list, and I need a new one for my desk. When I first started buying these for myself, it was mostly just for a fun little daily desk activity; but now I find them extremely useful—not just to tell me what day it is, but also I use the backs of the old pages as scrap paper (usually for Wordle and for to-do lists), and I also flip ahead to future pages to write reminders-I-need-to-see-while-at-my-computer (“renew library books,” “choose contest winner,” “happy birthday email to Melissa”).

Elizabeth specifies for her calendar: “something like art or poems, NOT quotes.” I too like art and prefer to avoid quotes, but also I don’t think I’d like poems. Well, there are at least a couple of art options to choose from!

Workman Art page-a-day Gallery calendar:

(image from Amazon.com)

The Met 365 Days of Masterpieces day-to-day calendar:

(image from Amazon.com)

A couple of times I’ve had an art-a-day calendar where the pages were double-sided, which is very nice for paper conservation and not as nice for scratch paper.

Thoughts of Dog day-to-day calendar. I like this Twitter account, but I don’t like it as much with that font and those drawings:

(image from Amazon.com)

We Rate Dogs day-to-day calendar. I follow this Twitter account, too, and I like the look of this calendar a lot more:

(image from Amazon.com)

Cartoons from The New Yorker day-to-day calendar. I have had this calendar before and I don’t remember it well but I remember being perfectly happy with it. Reliable mild humor, sometimes veering Boomerward.

(image from Amazon.com)

Workman 365 Cats page-a-day calendar or Cat Gallery page-a-day calendar. I’ve had quite a few cat calendars and this year I had the dog one, so I am feeling a little tired of this idea but on the other hand they’re always pleasing.

(image from Amazon.com)

(image from Amazon.com)

Audubon Birds page-a-day calendar. Oh BIRDS though! I haven’t had a birds one yet!

(image from Amazon.com)

1,000 Places To See Before You Die page-a-day calendar. The title makes me a little stressed, but I had another travel calendar before and it’s really just a bunch of pleasant pictures of someone else’s vacation, with little descriptions in case anything catches your eye and you want to know more. I find that while the title makes me feel pressured to go do a lot of traveling I don’t necessarily want to do, the calendar itself makes me feel as if I now HAVE IN FACT seen those places before dying, in that I have seen the pictures in the calendar.

(image from Amazon.com)

Atlas Obscura page-a-day calendar. Similar concept, less pressure.

(image from Amazon.com)

Wanderlust box calendar. Similar concept, less pressure AND less reading.

(image from Amazon.com)

Farmer’s Almanac everyday calendar. Maybe! Could be an interesting eclectic assortment! Could be a lot of boring stuff! Hard to say! The sample page about conditioning hair with mayonnaise gives me pause.

(image from Amazon.com)

Shoes Gallery page-a-day calendar. I got this calendar one year on a whim and it was surprisingly pleasing. You don’t have to be like that book I read where a male author wrote a female point of view and it was all “Shoes shoes hot guy shoes shoes hot guy!,” which, as if. You can just appreciate interesting pictures of interesting shoes.

(image from Amazon.com)

Paper Airplane fold-a-day calendar. This isn’t a candidate for Elizabeth or for me, but I got this one year for Paul and he liked it. Maybe I’ll buy it for him again this year.

(image from Amazon.com)

Living Language Spanish day-to-day calendar. Again not for Elizabeth or me, but Henry has “fun Spanish-learning things” on his wish list. (If you have other ideas DO TELL!)

(image from Amazon.com)

Pokémon day-to-day calendar. I don’t mind telling you that I have become re-obsessed with playing Pokémon Go on my phone, so this catches my eye.

(image from Amazon.com)

Oh, Simon’s Cat! I remember Simon’s cat!

(image from Amazon.com)

Animal Crossings New Horizons day-by-day calendar! We played so much of this in the early days of the pandemic!

(image from Amazon.com)

Hamilton day-to-day calendar. Perhaps this is relevant to your interests.

(image from Amazon.com)

Bob Ross: A Happy Little Day-to-Day calendar. It is perhaps indicative of my current-long-term frame of my mind that I saw this calendar and immediately got weepy.

(image from Amazon.com)

I just impulsively put together a seasonal/December/pre-Christmas care package for Rob, my eldest who is living far away and not coming home for Christmas this year. My goal was to get it shipped for free from Target, which meant hitting $35—but I didn’t want to go too much over, because this was impulsive. I succeeded in this goal: the total was just over $37.

My other goal was to send things that would not overly oppress him: he doesn’t want Too Much Stuff, he doesn’t want Too Many Sweets. These preferences can be challenging for a parent who loves Stuff and Sweets, and who inclines towards showing love through those things; also, he IS just starting out in a new place with only what he could carry in his airplane luggage, so my hope is that SOME, SMALL number of things will still be useful. My other hope is that by this point in adulthood or by a point sometime soon he will have taken on board a sense of Middle Ground, and that we can come to an arrangement where I dial my shopping/lavishing inclinations wayyyyyy back, AND tactfully/completely fail to notice/care if he keeps the items; and where HE accepts the items in the loving parental spirit in which they were intended, AND finds friends or a local charity to take anything he doesn’t want.

…I am looping back to edit this section after posting only the very first thing that I purchased, because it is clear to me as I try to select a second item to post that although I DID dial things way back, I did NOT succeed in not sending Stuff. I just didn’t. It reminds me of a scene from the book Life with Father by Clarence Day, where he is describing the spending habits of his mother, and he says something about how after she had kept herself from buying nine simply divine teacups, it didn’t seem so very terrible to give in and buy the tenth. I felt at the time I was assembling the care package that I was showing enormous restraint by NOT sending all the things I WANTED to send, and there were SO many things I REMOVED from the cart—well, but now I see I will be lucky if he doesn’t sigh over the waste before bringing the whole parcel to Goodwill. Well!! If so, there will be someone at Goodwill who benefits, and how nice!

Here is what I sent, if you have someone similar to send an impulsive and perhaps unwise Christmas care package to—or perhaps you have someone who DOES like Stuff and Sweets!

Mrs. Meyer’s Iowa Pine hand soap. I started with this because I buy it every year. And it’s consumable/useful, so I hope it will not oppress the little minimalist; but I hope it will also smack pleasantly of December and Christmas and home.

(image from Target.com)

50ct white Christmas tree lights. It is just a WEE little string of them! Like what you’d have in a college dorm room, or even littler than that! And they tend to stop working after a couple of years anyway!

(image from Target.com)

Cotton pug kitchen towel. I’d bought one of these for myself and liked it even better than I’d expected. And everyone needs kitchen towels! And I only bought ONE, when I’d wanted to buy him TWO (I would have gotten a different design as the second towel, for variety). And I DIDN’T buy him the coordinating bathroom hand towels OR the coordinating mug!

(image from Target.com)

Just one single melamine Christmas plate. NOT two different ones for variety, as I would have preferred. And also, I’d WANTED to buy him the Christmas-tree-shaped one, but Paul said if I wanted there to be any chance of him keeping it, it would HAVE to stack with his other plates, and I saw the wisdom of that and COMPROMISED.

(image from Target.com)

Candy cane napkins. He uses cloth napkins AND his favorite color is green!! Also: I had already bought a pair of these for my household (along with another kind, for variety), then realized they’d be perfect for him and set one of them aside to include with his Christmas box—but then the total was just under $35, and the napkins were on sale for $3.50; and this way he can use them through the Christmas season instead of not starting until Christmas.

(image from Target.com)

Snack pack of Pepperidge Farm Christmas cookies. Just one lil individual snack-pack of cookies, not a full pack, and not the entire cute polar-bear-themed sewing-kit tin of cookies I would have sent a child who liked more sweets! And no second thing of cookies, for variety! And no Christmas candy!

(image from Target.com)

One single serving of Ghirardelli hot cocoa mix. Not a whole box, even though a whole box would have had eight times as much for three times the price! And no cocoa toppers, or marshmallows, or what have you! Just one austere little packet!!

(image from Target.com)

Holiday flannel sheet set. OKAY I UNDERSTAND WHAT I’VE DONE, YOU DON’T HAVE TO INDIRECTLY SCOLD ME WITH STORIES ABOUT HOW YOUR MOTHER NEVER LISTENS TO YOU WHEN YOU SAY YOU DON’T WANT ANY MORE OF THE UNWANTED STUFF SHE CONSTANTLY BURDENS YOU WITH, THIS IS NOT THE SAME THING AND YOUR MOTHER IS NOT TRYING AS HARD AS I AM. But also: he had a set of flannel sheets this same color that he used until they absolutely fell into scraps—and I got the ones that were more “pine trees, why not year-round?” and less CHRISTMAS CHRISTMAS ONLY CHRISTMAS. And he’s only lived in his new place since summer, so he might not HAVE flannel sheets yet. And they were on sale. And I took the sweet little three-pack of dressed birdies and nice little flocked trees out of the cart! I AM NOT EXCUSING I AM JUST EXPLAINING.

(image from Target.com)

You know what, I am turning this into a little Christmas/winter giveaway for someone who WOULD like to receive a box like this from their parent!! If you have a mailing address in the United States (it can be your address, or you can have me send it as a gift to someone you know in the U.S.), and you (or the someone you know) DOES like sweets and stuff, I will send you (or them) a VERY VERY SIMILAR box (I don’t want to promise EXACT, because things are selling out fast).

This is going to be a fast one, because of what I just mentioned in the parenthetical about things selling out fast: I will choose a winner tomorrow (Wednesday the 7th) evening sometime. To enter, leave any comment; I will follow up with the winner about whether the package should be Christmas- or Winter-themed. (I will also ask the winner if they have a twin-sized bed they’d like sheets for, in which case I will choose one of the available sets and it will be a surprise; if not, I will substitute some of the things I kept myself from sending Rob.)

(If you want to comment but DON’T want to enter, just add something about not wanting to enter.)