I am still sick. The flu part is getting a little better each day, I can tell: it’s still gross, but I am up and around more, and my appetite is significantly better, and I have more ability to do things. Before, I had to pick the number one biggest priority for each day (“scoop litter box”; “pay college tuition bill”) and try to do that, but now I can do extras like bossing the children to clean the kitchen, and bossing them to help me take down the Christmas ornaments. Paul is still handling dinners each night, and after a couple of weeks of this he’s getting all frustrated and worn down and out of ideas and tired of cleaning up afterward, and I am like I KNOW RIGHT.

Right now the main issue is my ear. Last night it hurt so badly I couldn’t sleep, and I was worried Something Was Going Terribly Wrong. That was WITH ibuprofen. I took two benadryl, two decongestants; it still hurt too much. Finally the previous dose of ibuprofen wore off and I took THREE ibuprofen, and that was enough to let me sleep for a few hours. The earliest my doctor can see me is in a week and two days; the earliest the office’s nurse-practitioner can see me is tomorrow; I took the nurse-practitioner appointment but may need to instead go back to Urgent Care today. But this morning it feels enough better that I am second-guessing. Not SO much better (as in, maybe the ear drum ruptured and now it feels so much better!) but not terribly painful either. Just the usual sore, clogged, and I can hear nothing but my pulse. I’m letting the ibuprofen wear off on purpose (which might be a bad idea) so I can further assess the pain levels.

I am worried about taking so many NSAIDS day after day, week after week. Each doctor so far has said to take ibuprofen, but once a day or so I take acetaminophen instead, in case that’s a good idea. I remember seeing somewhere that acetaminophen and ibuprofen are processed by different organs (kidneys/liver?), so maybe it helps to give the liver/kidneys a break and let the kidneys/liver take one round.

Speaking of liver, I never do Dry January, for reasons ranging from not wanting to do unpleasant things just for the sake of doing them, to feeling that January is plenty grim enough—but I notice that because of being ill, I have not had a drink since December 23rd. (I’m not sure if I DID have a drink on December 23rd, but I know I DIDN’T on the 24th or since.) So I have a very nice head-start on doing something just for the sake of doing it, if I wanted to! I had coffee the first few days of being sick, but then stopped because it was making me feel worse, so I’ve also been coffee-free since, say, December 27th or 28th. I had expected to see more of an amazing transformation of skin and/or mental health and/or sleep from cutting out both alcohol and coffee, but I guess flu is interfering with that.

I read Lessons in Chemistry (Target link, Amazon link) only after more than one person declared FERVENTLY that both the cover and title did the book a disservice. A library patron told me it was one of her favorite books of the year, and that she NEVER would have read it except that her friend told her to, and she put it on hold without noticing the cover, and then she felt obligated to at least try it.

(image from Target.com)

I was hoping I wouldn’t like it, because then what am I supposed to do with the million other bright-pastel covers with slight-boring-wordplay titles? All the other cartoon women looking sideways, arms crossed or hands on hips, with or without sunglasses, with or without visible men to look sardonically at? All the other cartoon women in lab coats with charmingly messy updos, so smart and nerdy, probably clumsy and probably they snort when they laugh like Sandra Bullock or Anne Hathaway trying to be nerdy; and SO hoping to take their glasses off and let their hair down and get some boring guy to like them and make their sad independent accomplished lives complete?

(images from Target.com)

Unfortunately I thought it was great. I liked the protagonist, who was not clumsy and did not snort, and did put her hair up charmingly but was not looking for love, and did not have to go through some ridiculous set-up (she can’t have the desirable apartment unless she agrees to let the landlord’s son have a room! she has to pretend to her family to be dating some guy she just met and finds So Annoying…and wishes she didn’t find So Attractive!) to find it. (She did have to have the Initial Poor Impression meeting, but that seems literally unavoidable in fiction right now: it’s either Meet Cute or Meet Huffy.)

I didn’t think the romance was too much. There was a precocious child, but I found her not only tolerable but appealing. There was a precocious dog, and I loved him to the point of frequent tears. I also loved the neighbor, the pastor, the obstetrician, the friend/supervisor. When the book’s plot was described to me, I was not interested; but when a middle-aged woman in a bookstore told me vigorously that I should read it despite the cover, I obeyed. Let me be your middle-aged woman in a bookstore.

I have been sick, and I am still sick. The level of sick I have been: I have not been at my computer; I did not for many days feel up to having my laptop up in bed with me either; I lost my Wordle and Waffle streaks. At one point I wanted ginger ale, and I needed to text Paul to bring some to me, but my phone was on my bedside table and I would have to reach my arm out from under the covers to get it; it took me over ten minutes to achieve that. I got into the shower one morning, and I could not finish the shower: I had to just sort of wrap it up halfway and get out and dry off, and then I had to put my towel on the bed and lie down for awhile before I could get dressed. There is a particular category of illness where one lies in bed, not even bored, just sort of lying there doing nothing hour after hour, and this was that category of illness. After a couple of days, I was able to start reading People magazines. Now I am up to Light Novels.

My main symptoms were fever, cough, runny nose (at first a ton of sneezing, then just running/stuffy), congestion, exhaustion, loss of senses of taste/smell, plus body aches and chills and so forth but I file those under fever. I went to urgent care not for those symptoms, but when the pain and pressure in one ear became worrisome. The doctor was distracted by the ear (he diagnosed an ear canal infection, which led to an Unpleasant Procedure ((A WICK!! A WICK IN MY EAR!!)) and then seven days of ear drops), but said that even with the suspicious taste/smell-loss symptoms, he did not think it was Covid, he thought it was flu. (It had been too many days since symptom-onset for it to be worthwhile to do a flu test.) He said my symptoms lined up with a type of flu that was currently rampant in our area.

I had to go back two days later to have the ear re-evaluated. I saw a different doctor, who confirmed the first doctor’s assessment of the ear, and reassured me that yes, it would still be hurting badly enough to wake me up in the night, even with the wick and two days of antibiotic drops. He also asked about my other symptoms, and not only agreed with the doctor that it was likely flu, he narrowed it down and said he thought it was novel influenza A. In case you are someone who likes to know the virus. He said it’s everywhere in our area, and that it seems to be lasting “a good two weeks” for most people. I am not sure whether to count from the very first symptoms (a feeling of “maybe coming down with a cold” on Christmas Eve) or from the first serious symptoms (feeling very bad on Christmas Day evening, happily after all the important Christmassing was done), but either way I may be within sight of the end of this.

I still can’t smell or taste things, which still seems suspicious to me; I have taken four covid rapid tests, all negative, but I worry they are not sufficiently effective at diagnosing newer strains. I sprayed some foaming bleach spray into the toilet bowl and onto the shower curtain (I am not up to cleaning, but I can do some quick killing), and I could not smell it at all. I lit some matches and blew them out: I could not smell them. I cannot smell Vicks VapoRub!! And I can’t hear out of the ear that is infected, except I can hear my own pulse. My whole head feels wrong. I feel semi-disconnected from reality.

I have missed two weeks of work; I don’t know the last time I was sick enough to miss two weeks of work. Never? I did get flu once before, but it was when I had small children, so there was no taking time off. I remember putting out a bunch of sippee cups of milk and a box of dry cereal, putting the TV on some kids’ channel, and then curling up in a recliner and trying to stay alive.

The last time I got flu, I was vaccinated at my doctor’s office. I asked the nurse how painful the shot was that year, because it seems to vary from year to year. She said not to worry: she had a particular technique that surprised people with how painless it was. She told me that people say to her, “Wow, shots usually hurt, but not when you do it! My arm wasn’t even sore afterward!” I watched as she gave me the shot, then pulled the needle out with a flair; the vaccine liquid made a watery arc through the air. Her shots didn’t hurt because the fluid was not going into the muscle. I did not say anything. I got the flu. I wonder how many of her other patients also got the flu. I wonder if she is still giving completely ineffective shots and feeling proud of her technique. I hope at some point they gave her a student trainee, and the student trainee said, “But…the shot went into the air.”

This year I wonder if it was because I got the flu shot at the same time as the covid shot. They said it was okay to do that, but I don’t trust them not to say something is okay if it’s less than ideal but they think more people will get the shots that way; I might make that same call, if I were them. But also, I know the flu shot doesn’t cover all the strains, it just covers the predicted strains; I also know that even if you get the right shot for the right strains, your particular body might fail to take up the sword. Edward got both chicken pox vaccinations, but when doctors did a blood test before starting the Remicade, it showed no immunity to chicken pox.

So who knows why, but our whole household got sick. Our timing was very lucky: Paul was sick BEFORE Christmas, but was better by the day; the rest of us didn’t feel really bad until AFTER Christmas; so Christmas was not ruined, and also there has always been an adult who feels well enough to go to the grocery store and/or pharmacy. Three of the six of us have had ear complications requiring antibiotics (two of us got drops, one of us got pills), which I think is interesting. One of us had sinus complications that might have become serious, but they used a sinus rinse (Target link, Amazon link) and did steam treatments (leaning over a bowl of just-boiled water with a towel tent over the head), and those seemed to beat it into submission.

One reason I am telling you about this recent/ongoing illness is because misery loves company: now that I’m well enough to use a computer, I’d love to hear about it if you’ve been sick too. Your symptoms! Did you stay in bed for some of it? DID IT GET YOUR EAR?? The other reason I’m telling you is that I’ve noticed that ever since the pandemic, people seem to be more secretive about being sick. I remember people used to complain all over social media about it! But now it’s as if it’s something shameful: if you are sick, it’s maybe that you weren’t being careful; maybe you were socializing irresponsibly; also, maybe you got other people sick. A feeling of blame. But there sure is a lot less of that once someone starts the ball rolling! I said on Facebook that we’d all been sick, and a BUNCH of people commented that they’d been sick too, and my impression is that they were commenting with RELIEF: it’s not just us! other people are sick too!

I packed up Rob’s gifts, then had to repack them because the box wasn’t big enough, then had to repack them because the bigger box would have been $58 to mail and it was actually cheaper to use two flat-rate boxes, and the USPS is no longer a service but a capitalist organization that gives extreme discount prices to giant businesses and passes those expenses on to small businesses and individual citizens—but anyway I got them packed and dropped them off at the post office, and this is just what it costs. That piece of Christmas has clicked into place, or perhaps it will click into place when it arrives successfully at Rob’s apartment; anyway, my part is done.

I acquired a gift and a gift bag for my annual friend-group Yankee Swap, and now the party and gift are completed, and one of the first celebrations of Christmas has been a lovely success. CLICK!

I assembled the gift box for Paul’s sister, and went out to get a couple more things because it had empty spaces, and I filled in the empty spaces, and packed it up and took it to the post office. Now the piece of furniture that was covered in shipping boxes (for my parents, for Rob, for Paul’s sister) is cleared! CLICK!

On that same shopping trip I picked up a couple things for my workplace Secret Santa assignment, so that is now assembled in a gift bag for whenever I feel like bringing it in to work (I feel like waiting until a little closer to Christmas). Not a CLICK yet, but a click in launching position.

This weekend is the drop-off for the local Christmas organization, so tomorrow’s task after work is taking all those purchased items and assembling them as specified by the organization (a surprisingly layered process, including labeled/numbered bags within labeled/numbered bags), and filling out the organization’s inventory form, and making sure I remembered to print out gift receipts for everything, and remembering to include the rolls of wrapping paper and tape, and so on. I am looking forward to this (last year I got a HUGE rush of Happy Community Feeling from it), but also I am looking forward to having all those boxes and bags cleared out of the house!

Then, let’s see. Wrapping the rest of the kids’ and Paul’s gifts, and checking to see if there are any gaps that need to be filled. One more thing each for my brother and for my sister-in-law, and then wrapping the presents for them and for my niece and nephew, and arranging to meet my brother halfway between our houses (we’re about an hour apart) to exchange bags. Going to Trader Joe’s to see if they have Kringles for Christmas morning (we got an almond one and put it in the freezer already, but I am hoping for a seasonal flavor). Putting gift cards out for various delivery people. Sorting through the piles of stocking stuff.

Is this actually getting wrapped up? I wonder if my stress always ramps up RIGHT before everything starts sorting out nicely. What are you working on, if applicable, and what still looms?

I should start tracking this to see if it’s the same every year; I can say that THIS year the change from “This is fun; I’ve got this!” to feeling overwhelmed/stressed happened right around December 11th. I am hugely grateful to Past Swistle who got all the cards done early, as well as the all the shopping for the two kids from the local Christmas program, as well as quite a bit of other shopping.

I am having my usual and apparently ENDLESS/LIFETIME struggle with thinking I have to do The Most Important Thing FIRST, and then getting stuck because I can’t do that most important thing yet. Fortunately I am also having my usual and apparently ENDLESS/LIFETIME rediscovering of “If I can’t do The Most Important Thing, it is helpful to do LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE.” This means that a week later, when there is a new Most Important Thing, sometimes I have ALREADY DONE IT when it was not yet a priority. It can feel a little silly to be shopping for Target gift cards for the mail carriers when it is still a month until I need those and it is MUCH MORE IMPORTANT to get Rob’s gifts purchased and into the mail—but it doesn’t feel silly when it’s a week until Christmas and shipping would take 10 days and I wouldn’t want to go into a store, and instead I can just reach into my gift cupboard where the cards have been nestled up and waiting for a couple of weeks.

It is making me clench my teeth to see so many shipping estimates already after Christmas, especially a day or two ago when there were still TWO WHOLE WEEKS before Christmas. You know I have a persistent goal of trying to cut back on Amazon shopping (I am not in any way trying to eliminate it entirely), but there are times when Amazon can get something to me well before Christmas, and the company I’d rather order from is saying it will be January 3-10th, and in those cases I am not feeling even the slightest inclination to self-scold. Oh, I suppose you could get stroppy about it and say “Well, you should have gotten yourself organized to order it back before Thanksgiving, then!!,” but I do hope none of us would be like that, either to ourselves or to others. Not at this festive season.

And things ARE still festive! I don’t mean to imply I am now a roiling mass of stress and nothing is fun! No! I am enjoying the Christmas lights, and reading my Christmas books. We are watching a Christmas show or part of a Christmas movie each evening. I am using my Christmas mugs, which is one of my favorite things; and Henry has been on a pre-bedtime tea kick, which I have joined, so that means choosing an extra Christmas mug each day. Over the weekend I tried a festive cranberry cheesecake recipe, which I was going to save until closer to Christmas—except I remembered we always have PLENTY of sweet festive foods close to Christmas. So I made it at the perfect moment, which was just in time to start stress-eating it.

I am enjoying the feeling of ticking things off the list. At this point, the rising stress is what helps me finally click the order button on things I’ve been waffling about. There is no more time to browse pages of earring possibilities for your niece, it is time to click and purchase! You need one more gift for Paul’s sister before you can ship her box, so you’d better pick something now! A little surge of stress, followed by the satisfaction of having successfully Done the Thing: the earrings ordered, the gift chosen and bought, the relief of no longer waffling.

It is pleasing to track the package I mailed to my parents and see that it will be there today; once it’s there, that part of Christmas clicks into place. This weekend we will fetch the twins, and then all of us who are coming home will be home, and THAT part of Christmas will click into place. I will select a gift for my workplace Secret Santa exchange, and I will put it in a pretty gift bag and sneak it into work and put it somewhere they’ll find it, and there will be another click. Click, click, click, it is getting done!

FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS (management shake-up, literal building/structural chaos, an unusual number of employees leaving and being replaced but not soon enough so there has been scrambling, and then of course there are New People), my co-workers and I have recently been under noticeable levels of occupational stress. “This is fine,” we say to each other numerous times per day. “It’s fine. We’re fine.”

Also: in December, it is common for some of us, like maybe a third to us (which seems like the perfect percentage to make it easy for each person to do it or not as they prefer), to give out a small giftie to each of our co-workers. Last year, I handed out treat baggies containing a packet of cocoa (cinnamon, which was the best, but that’s discontinued so I’ve linked to pumpkin spice which is also good), a tea bag, a lil snack (these look nutritious/breakfasty, but they taste like big delicious cinnamon/oaty creme-filled cookies), and several little candies.

(image from Target.com)

THIS year, I would like to do something with a little bit of a calming / stress-relief theme. Imagine the same baggies, but filled with:

• a face-mask: they were on a 50%-off-plus-$10-gift-card-if-you-spend-$30 deal, I’m sorry, I should have given you a heads up but it all happened so fast, but anyway I acquired enough to give one to each co-worker

• a soothing tea bag, maybe a second soothing tea bag

(image from Target.com)

• a piece of chocolate, maybe some soothing cookies

And probably that’s enough. But does anything else spring to mind? I want to be careful to avoid the Wedding Favor Trap, where one starts to buy things just to buy things, and ends up spending quite a bit of money on multiples of things no one actually wants, so maybe I should just stop right there: if I were the recipient, I would enjoy those things but not, say, a stress ball purchased just to hammer home the concept of stress relief. And something like calming lavender hand lotion is nice, but too expensive when multiplied by more than a dozen coworkers. I would LOVE to do some tiny liquor bottles, but I am aware of several coworkers who do not drink.

Like, just for starters, this poster Henry (age 16) wanted:

(image from Amazon.com)

What……what am I looking at?

He also wanted Tales of the Dying Earth, by Jack Vance.

(image from Amazon.com)

I generally like to get them any book they ask for, but mid-century male-written science fiction makes me nervous. It’s so often simply PACKED with the written equivalent of busty warrior women wearing skimpy leather battle bikinis, among other problematic themes. I was interested to see that Jack Vance has also written as Ellery Queen; it’s been a long, long time, but I remember reading through our library’s collection of Ellery Queen. Maybe in high school?

Elizabeth has this bike bell (in currently-unavailable blue), and said she asked Rob if he has a bike bell, and he says he does not, and she thinks we should get him this one, so I got it for him in yellow.

(image from Amazon.com)

Elizabeth wanted a grow light for a plant she has in her dorm room. It was hard to choose one, so I hope this one is good.

(image from Amazon.com)

I looked for one that would come on and off automatically.

I have a child who loves (1) Taco Bell and (2) Untitled Goose Game, so this Take Bell t-shirt is going under the tree.

(image from Amazon.com)

For my nephew who likes Strange Planet, the 2024 day-to-day calendar.

(image from Amazon.com)

Hoodies hoodies hoodies for everyone. (WAIT FOR SALES. THERE ARE ALWAYS SALES.)

(image from gap.com)

Elizabeth got a set of these blank journals awhile back, and asked for another set for Christmas:

(image from Amazon.com)

She also asked for American Sign Language flash cards; she and her friends are trying to learn it.

(image from Amazon.com)

And she’s asked for Posca markers.

(image from Amazon.com)

William asked for Sculpey; we have a toolbox full of it, but he wanted his own.

(image from Amazon.com)

William also wants a Peter’s Projection Map, but we have enough things for him for Christmas so this will probably be birthday.

(image from Amazon.com)

I thought about getting William this rental-friendly home-repair book, now that he’s graduated college—but since he doesn’t have an apartment lined up yet, I didn’t want the gift to seem Pointed. Perhaps this can be for birthday, too. Or perhaps none of our children will ever be able to afford rent, at the rate things are going.

(image from Amazon.com)

I would be very interested to hear what you are getting for the assorted teenagers in your life. I am hoping to poach your ideas.

You may remember me saying not long ago that I was not planning to do a Calendar Post this year. I’d been doing them for over a decade, so it felt weird to stop, but I wanted to stop so I thought I would stop. I particularly liked Allison‘s comment: “I will miss the calendar post, but I am all for people quitting things that don’t serve them anymore, and not doing things just because they have always been done.”

YES. I too am all for that!! We can stop doing Christmas cards, if we don’t want to do them anymore, or we can do them just on the years we feel like it! We can taper off on that tradition of buying each kid a new ornament every year, if it starts not making sense anymore! We can make gingerbread houses every year if we want to, or we can make them just some years, or we can stop making them, or we can tell the other people in the household that if THEY want to make them so badly THEY can be the ones to run that gigantic messy project and clean up after it! We can send Paul’s sister a box of See’s chocolates each year for four years and then stop doing it and send a different treat instead! We can do a certain thing every year or every month or every week, and then we can just…STOP. So I felt relief about the calendar post. I felt good about the decision. I added “I am all for people quitting things that don’t serve them” to my personal philosophy.

Well, but then I started putting calendar options in my cart, and I found I was feeling the urge to post the options, to show you and/or to get your opinion and/or so that maybe we’d be calendar twins next year. Which is how the calendar posts started originally! At this point I only need one for my kitchen, but back then I had multiple calendars to buy: I used to buy one for my kitchen, and one for by my desk, plus one for each kid bedroom—so there were a LOT of calendars to consider. And then I got really into it and started looking for more options, calendars I wasn’t myself considering but thought other people might like to consider, maybe some amusing or whimsical options.

Which doesn’t mean it has to be done that way forever! I can go back and do a reduced version of the original way—which would also combine well with what commenter Lauren suggested, which is that maybe we could do a sort of DIY calendar post where people could still talk in the comments about what they’re choosing this year. Well, that sounds just perfect. Those of us who still buy wall calendars are a SHRINKING SUBPOPULATION, and I too would still like to hear about what the rest of you are getting. So I will just show the calendars I am considering this year, without making a big PRODUCTION out of it, and everyone else who’s interested can talk about the calendars they’re considering/buying this year.

(image from Amazon.com)

Annie Soudain calendar. I appreciate art that lines up with the seasons, and I like these pictures. So I can’t explain why every time I look at the pictures I get a little negative adrenaline. It shouldn’t be happening! But it is. And this is going to be an election year, and last election year I got stress hives for months, so let’s reduce adrenaline where we can, even if it is inexplicable adrenaline that makes no sense.

(image from Amazon.com)

Joyful Landscapes calendar. This seems more soothing. Perhaps it is a little trite? But I like the colors, and there’s lots to look at in each picture, and I am not looking for, like, ART THAT SHOCKS YOU AND MAKES YOU THINK this year. There is nothing wrong with pleasant and mild.

(image from Amazon.com)

Feline: Terry Runyan’s Cats calendar. I have had this calendar twice before, and have been very happy with it both times. I don’t know if I would repeat a calendar a third time, but it’s a known hit and that’s hard to refuse completely, and also there are a couple particularly charming pages this year.

(image from Amazon.com)

Esté Macleod calendar. This is another one I’ve successfully bought twice, so it’s unlikely I would choose it again so soon and yet I don’t want to automatically dismiss it. But the art is giving me an inexplicable adrenalized feeling like the Annie Soudain (I think for a non-election year I would experience it as “stimulating,” but anxiety is warping it), and those two things combined are enough for me to remove it from the cart for this upcoming year—but I wanted to mention it in case you wanted to consider it, because I did enjoy it the other two years.

(image from Amazon.com)

There are at least three (one! two! three!) William Morris wall calendars, and my inability to prefer one over the others may be what prevents me from buying any of them. But one of my most surprisingly satisfying calendars EVER was a wallpaper calendar, so I don’t want to be too quick to get discouraged.

(image from Amazon.com)

Praise for the Pollinators calendar. I like the pictures and I like the VARIETY of the pictures.

(image from Amazon.com)

Royal Academy of Arts calendar. This calendar gets even more points for variety: I like that every page is a different artist.

(image from Amazon.com)

Orders of the Animals calendar. Lots of interesting things to look at, and I like the overall style of the art, and I feel as if I’d learn something.

Okay, that’s it! What I will do now is keep looking at them in my cart (or I keep re-reading this post), and what usually happens next is I start feeling “I just don’t WANT that one, even though I SHOULD and sort of DO!” about some of them, and eventually I think “I just WANT that one, and I don’t know why!” about ONE, and then I buy it.

If you are one of the wall-calendar group: What are you buying this year, and/or what is your calendar-choosing strategy?

Do you know what I have noticed, just the past few years? They are playing Dan Fogelberg’s Same Old Lang Syne amidst the Christmas songs. I do not at all object: it takes place on Christmas Eve! And that is a song from my childhood, albeit one that baffled me as a child and baffles me in different ways as an adult (DID THEIR GROCERIES NOT MELT AS THEY SAT IN THE CAR FOR HOURS??? DIDN’T THEIR RESPECTIVE PARTNERS WONDER WHERE THEY WERE??? THEY SHARED A SIX-PACK AND THEN DROVE???).

But what I mean is that I don’t remember hearing it as a Christmas song before a few years ago. Now, I could be misremembering. This could be an early-onset neurological thing. But…I listen to Christmas songs a LOT, starting as soon as Thanksgiving is over. And it is a VERY childhood-associated song for me. So if they HAD played it on Christmas radio before, I feel like I WOULD HAVE NOTICED, because the FIRST time they played it on Christmas radio (…that I remember…) I was jaw-dropped RIVETED. I remember I was taking a shower, and as it started playing I just stood there listening with that weird feeling of “This is so incredibly familiar but also I don’t know what it is.” Once I recognized it, it was interesting listening to the song’s story as an adult rather than as a child.

Also: that song is OVER FIVE MINUTES LONG.

I am in that middle range of Christmas shopping. I had a bunch of things in various online carts, and some of those things went on sale over the several weeks of Black/Cyber/Friday/Monday and I bought them, and some of those things I decided not to buy. I have more things that I would like to buy, and it’s hard to know if I should wait for a sale. And I have a lot of gaps to fill: in some cases I have several ideas and am waffling among them; in some cases I have tons of ideas that all seem Good Enough but I’m worried I’ll choose some and then find Something Better; and in some cases I don’t have any good ideas and am not sure when to start thinking about it for real, rather than waiting for ideas to come to me on their own. So after a flurry of packages, there is a lull.

I thought of a good idea for Rob, but the execution of it would be challenging. There is this particular local store-brand pizza sauce that he likes far more than any other sauce. [Edited to clarify: local TO ME, I mean; Rob can’t buy it where he is now.] There is no way, as far as I can tell, to buy it online and have it shipped to him. But I could go to considerable effort and expense to do it myself. The trouble is: do we think it will work to ship glass jars of pizza sauce, or do we think this shipment is more likely to break, leaking terribly staining sauce over many people’s holiday packages?

I thought I could start by asking a grocery store employee if the sauce comes to them in a nice sturdy case. Like, I’m imagining it coming to them in a box with cardboard dividers between each jar. Perhaps they would sell me an entire case with the packaging.

Still, even if it DOES have that packaging, that’s only designed to protect it from a truck ride, where everyone involved in moving it around is being relatively careful. It is NOT made for being dropped or thrown. It would be so disappointing to go to the trouble/expense and then have it arrive worthless.

I HAVE successfully shipped him a single jar of the sauce: I was sending some sort of box to him already, and the flat rate box was the better price but was only half-full, so I was trying to think of what to put in there. I wrapped the jar in that big-bubble bubble wrap and put it in a gallon ziploc just in case, and it DID get there safely. So even if I don’t brave a case of it, I’ll bet I could send a jar or two in the Christmas box I’ll already be sending. And one does want to be careful not to deluge one’s adult children with things they USED to like but maybe have since found acceptable replacements for and no longer feel strongly about. A jar or two can be fun and appreciated no matter the situation; a case might be “ohhhhhhh noooooooooo.”