November 8, 2007 - Thursday
We leave for England a week from today...that means there are 7 days left...7 days left to pack, organize, shop, wrap,
mail, send, wash and clean. In some ways that seems like an eternity, and in others it seems like a brief moment that
could slip by if I blink too quickly. I guess what my parents always said is true...time DOES speed up as you get older!
The past few days have been spent continuing to get ready for our trip. The main thing I have been concentrating on is
Christmas shopping. It hadn't actually dawned on me that I needed to do the majority of my Christmas shopping and mailing
before we left...but when I realized this fact I was actually quite excited. I love to Christmas shop, so doing that
has been a soothing and de-stressing event in amongst all the chaos.
My shopping ventures have also been made easier due to the fact that the stores now seem to jump directly from
Halloween to Christmas, and skip over Thanksgiving entirely. Being emmersed in the retail world this week I might have
forgotten that we even HAD a Thanksgiving holiday coming up, I was surrounded by so much Christmas stuff. The only sign
of any turkeys or autumn leaves was a small stand of Thanksgiving cards at WalMart this week, just to pay tribute to the holiday.
Meanwhile the WalMart workers, decked out in their little blue vests and Santa hats, busily strung tinsel and put out the
Christmas merchandise.
While I think this is odd, being that it's only November and the beginning of November at that, I was very pleased to have
nearly unlimted access to every sort of Christmas wrap and bow and ribbon I could ever want. In fact, I was the only one in
the whole section of the store...probably because the rest of Mooresville is still coming down off their sugar-high from
Halloween and can't begin to think about Christmas yet.
This pre-Christmas-Holiday-High has also filtered into the department stores. This has been wonderful, as I have gotten
first pick of all the Christmas gift sets and special pre-Christmas sales. All in all, a very satisfying shopping experience.
Of course, gifts and deocrations are NOT what Christmas is all about...but it is one of the many things about Christmas that
I enjoy.
With all my shopping done the next step has been to delve into the large pile of boxes lurking in our garage and to try to
find appropriate packaging for each gift. Once that is complete I can concentrate on wrapping and shipping. By the time I am
finished the people at the post office are going to know me by name!
And of course, there is another benefit to all of this...getting in the Christmas spirit so early this year gives me an
even better excuse to start playing my Christmas music! This should greatly please Steve, as he has been known to sing various
versions of "Frosty the Snowman" and "Joy to the World" all year round!
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