Christmas, thats a wrap!

Twas a tough Christmas season for our store this year. Things were looking good until the Thursday before, when it started to rain. The rain led to a sort of rural Midwestern paranoia regarding "black ice" which left the store empty. Friday the rain turned to snow, and although the final accumulation was less than 1", again the store lay dormant. I was hoping Saturday would make up for the bad weather, but it never really materialized. We did not "make it work."

After closing on my new home on the 15th, I drove back to Iowa (sick) for the family Christmas. In my family, my fellow siblings and I exchange gifts in a kind of white elephant ritual. The game allows us to maintain the illusion of thoughtfulness, while saving everyone a little dough and the hassle of having to actually think about what to buy for each person.

No doubt you have participated in a similar gift exchange, although more likely at work or with buddies than with your kin. Everyone brings one gift (or set of gifts), which are placed in the center of the room. We then draw numbers out of a hat. Family member #1 then picks a gift and opens it. #2 has the option of opening an unopened gift, or stealing the gift from #1. Etc, etc Once all the gifts are open, each person gets another shot at getting the gift they really wanted.

This year, I brought the first season of Monk. My sister-in-law first opened my gift. It was then passed, unwillingly to my brother-in-law. He proceeded to trade it back to me for the Presto pizza cooker I had opened. So I went home with my own present.

For Christmas day, my parents drove to Wisconsin. They brought a couple of gifts for me to open, one of which happened to be the exact pizza maker that had been taken from me at our gathering the weekend before. My mother thought I looked disappointed when it was taken from me. She's very perceptive but slightly off base. The look on my face was one of disappointment, but not at having lost the pizza maker. Instead, I was thinking about how lame it was for me to return home with the very gift I had brought.

Upon reflection, this is perfectly acceptable. I'm probably the only person in my family who would enjoy Monk, and I don't like it enough to buy it for myself. So in a way everything worked out.

And then I found $5.

Also, thanks to my dad, I have a working washer and dryer right here in my basement. Its amazing.