Your Christmas is in the mail

Flippy and I pride ourselves on having removed all religious significance from our Christmas celebrations.  Oh sure, we still call it “Christmas”, but to us it’s just a word which implies Santa, elves, and reindeer.  People can wish me Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Solstice, whatever, it’s a non-denominational celebration where we eat good food, give and receive presents, and begin the countdown until Spring arrives.  There are no mangers at our house, but perhaps this year will see the return of the “ginger girls” (I’ll have to dig up a photo of our gay lawn decorations).  This past Monday I mailed the last of the gifts to my out-of-town friends and relatives, and it’s a huge relief to have that finished.  I love to shop, but I really dislike the shipping process of trying to find a box the correct size, filling out all the customs forms, and paying the outrageous postal fees.  I did manage to “hoard and recycle” all packing materials from packages we’d received during the earlier part of the year, but it makes our spare room look like Office Depot after a cyclone.  At least now the worst is over, because even though we still have to buy and wrap gifts for Flippy’s family, they only have to be delivered via the trunk of our car.

I’m also feeling a bit of a load off today because we took some things to the Goodwill donation centre, some LARGE things.  Well, “large” in the context of how much room they took up sitting on our floor.  We took two air cleaners (the hepa filter type, as I now use air cleaners with washable electrostatic filters), two 17” computer monitors, and a barely used automatic vacuum cleaner, similar to a Roomba.  It was a floor model we’d received as part of a Bag of Crap from Woot.com, and while it was neat, it didn’t seem to work very well on hard floors, and it drove the dogs crazy.  I hope someone else will get a kick out of it.  I still have a large humidifier to drop off, but it didn’t fit in the car, and we have one more 19” monitor which we’re giving to the vet’s office.  Then we’ll have huge parties because we’ll have so much room in our house, we won’t know what to do with ourselves.  Or maybe, I’ll just vacuum more often as I won’t have so many things to work around.

The experimental first (artificial) Christmas tree is still not up, but I’ve cleared a space for it, vacuumed the floor, and taken all the pieces out of the box.  By tomorrow evening, we should know if our cats can climb trees.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 12/08 at 07:50 AM

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  1. Ooooh please post pictures of the “ginger girls”!  They sound exciting! :)

    You will have made someone’s Christmas extra special with all of the things that you donated to Goodwill.  I bet that you will have some good karma headed your way!  Roomba’s are supposed to be a pretty hot gift this year.  I added one to my list thinking that it would help out a bit in the (carpeted) bird room.  My only concern is that it will scare them and send the dogs into a spazz.

    UGH! to having to wrap gifts, fit them into a box, fill out the stinking custom forms, and ship them.  It is such a royal PITA.  I just received a box from Canada the other day and was stunned at how much it cost to ship it.  It just seems like Canadians are hosed on so many fronts.  I am sure that I will suffer from a “price tag coronary” when I finally go back home.  LOL

    Posted by Expat  on  12/08  at  01:54 PM
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