Sweatermen

Scary Winter Driving

Coffee pods

Biscotti bits

Infirmities

Cool Christmas Ornament

Capers and Cauliflower

Advent intangibles and misadventures

Now that we are officially in Advent I can tell you a funny story.

When my kids were growing up, I always bought them one of those cheesy advent chocolate deals.  You know the one - a flat box with crappy chocolate inside of it.  Each day  you open up a little door on the front of the box and there's a piece of chocolate behind the door.  My kids LOVED them - even as teenagers.  It was pretty obvious from the pictures on the box that they were made for a younger audience, but they didn't care.  It was kind of a weird/fun thing that we did every year.

Well, about 3 years ago I saw an idea - I think in a Martha Stewart magazine.  She wrapped up little gifts for each day of advent.  I thought that seemed pretty cute, and the chocolate thing had gotten pretty lame.  So I decided to try it.  I went to Target and bought a bunch of little things - about half candy, and half  other things.  Little packs of tissue, small travel sized lotion, post-it notes, etc.  Nothing very expensive. 

Every year I go to a warehouse sale close to where I work where they sell lots of tiny little party favor boxes, wrapping paper, ribbon, etc.  So I had quite a stash of small boxes of various sorts.  And anything that I didn't have a box for I wrapped in christmas paper.  I used ribbon to tie a number onto each package, as I had them somewhat sorted so that they would get a candy item one day, then a non-candy item, etc.  I also separated out things like big bags of kisses and put them in smaller containers and didn't want them next to each other.

Are you with me so far?  The kids loved it.  They were both away in school and I think it helped them get through the holiday season.  Emma even had a little tree in her dorm room the first year that she put all the little packages under.  It was a big success, so I did it again last year.

This year I decided to up my game.  Remember the story I told you about Intangibles?  Well, I thought it would be fun this year to put little notes on all of the gifts.  I came up with 25 attributes for the notes, and figured out how to print them on my computer so that I could fold each note.  On the front it says :  #2 (or whatever the number is)   YOU ARE:    - - - then when they take the piece of paper off of the gift and open it, the attribute is on the inside - like SWEET,  or KIND.   I thought that Emma could add them to her intangibles jar, and Joe could start one, or save them, or do whatever.  So far, so good.  Sadly, here is where the plan,  unbeknownst to me at the time, began to fall apart.

Since I can't ever do anything the simple way......   I printed up two sheets of the lists, but instead of just going down the list and numbering them, I randomly put numbers on the sheets.  I was thinking that if the kids were together when they opened any of them (which they won't be) they wouldn't necessarily read the same thing on the same day.   Generally the way that I get the gifts figured out, is that I line them up down both sides of the dining room table, one side for each kid.  That way, as I said earlier, I can sort of adjust candy,  non-candy, don't put the chocolate kisses next to each other, etc.  After I had all of them lined up, I cut up the sheets with the numbers and the attributes on them and put them next to the packages on the corresponding days.  Then I started wrapping and taping.  Here is what they look like - multiply this times 25.  (50 little gifts).  So you can see here, that when you pull off the tag by the  number (which isn't completely taped down) the tag will open up and the attribute will be on the inside.

Did I mention that this is totally a labor of love and not for the faint hearted.?
Well, everything would have been just fabulous except for one tiny problem.  As I was finishing up, oh, about gift number 22, I figured something out.  Remember when I told you that I randomly assigned numbers to each sheet and then cut them all apart?  Well, UNFORTUNATELY,  when I did that I didn't keep the two sets SEPARATE.  Bad move. As I'm taping on the last of the numbers, I realized that there are some duplicates for each child, and no specific attributes for some.  For example, #8 might have been 'TALENTED" for one child, and #8 have been "KIND" for the other.  So when I realized this, I couldn't just swap them because of my brilliance in randomly assigning numbers to begin with.  Oy.   So after spending about 2 hours wrapping and attaching I spent about another hour plus trying to figure out the duplicates and get things rearranged.  I had a graph - I was reminded of Emma's Game Theory class at school. 

It seemed to get more convoluted as I went, so after I think I figured all but about 2 of the mismatches, I decided that Joe wouldn't notice, and Emma will read this and know.  (Sorry sweetie) -

My heart is in the right place, and if she gets two pieces of paper that say YOU ARE SWEET (or whatever the duplicates are) that's not the end of the world since all of the attributes are nice, right?   And it's more about knowing that you are loved and thought about than perfection.  That's what I'm going for. 

Martha would have gotten it right.