I know. I stole the title from something that was said at an Arrogant Worms concert, but I’ve thought it ever since.
If you’re sick of the usual Christmas songs, here’s one for you. It’s been stuck in my head since I heard it.
When I heard this one for the first time, I couldn’t stop laughing, while the other half of my mind was saying “This isn’t funny, so why are you laughing?” I think there was always a small part of me that wondered what was up with Santa’s happy elves. It’s kind of like the physics of Santa Claus.
I thought this would be another opportunity to tease my mom a little bit. There’s a line in here about being waterboarded with hot cocoa. This made me think of a conversation we had…that sounds terrible, but bear with me…where mom totally used the wrong word. We were out for dinner, and she was talking about how some friends’ kids were out on the lake and they went “waterboarding”. At this point, all the colour drained from my face…at least I’m pretty sure it did. I managed to ask her what they did again and we figured out it was wakeboarding. Oh! That’s a totally different thing! And the colour returned. Poor Mom. She must have wondered why I looked like I’d seen a ghost.
I know that every year, when talking about my Christmas shopping, I say that I was running behind, or a little late. But this year, I skidded into the finish line, and not a moment too soon! Seriously! I bought my last gift on December 23. That is not my style.
Some of that was because I didn’t get ideas until way later, but some of it is because of the clustershmoz that is shipping things between Canada and the U.S. now. And the simple solution would be to just get people Amazon gift cards, but in some cases, I just got them one of those! I like coming up with fun things to get them. I was lucky that one friend took me to a spa when I went to see her, and the name of the spa was in my email. Sometimes it pays to be an email hoarder. So I called the spa and they helped me buy and mail a gift card.
But the other friend was a whole other adventure. I ended up getting on Google Maps and finding some places near them that looked neat and tried to buy gift cards to them. I chose a breakfast place, a dinner place and an ice cream place because I’m silly. But I got this inspiration on Sunday, and one of my chosen places was only open Tuesday to Saturday! So after several snafus, I managed to get gift cards to two of the places. But the ice cream place let me down. The person on the phone claimed that the only way to buy a gift card was to come in the store and buy it. Gees! How oldschool!
But it’s not always a guarantee that you can buy gift cards to American restaurants if you live in Canada. Some of their payment systems only take zip codes. Dude! It’s the worldwide web. Not all my friends are local. How dumb is it to pretend the whole world is the U.S.?
And don’t even get me started on Apple. I was in a secret Santa exchange a couple of years ago, and the person I got was from the states and said she liked iTunes gift cards. So I thought “This will be simple!” After searching help files and getting stuck on hold with Apple Support, I found out that no, you can only buy iTunes cards in your own currency. Duuuuuumb! I mean, if Apple Pay can’t handle it, credit cards have figured out currency conversion for years. It’s not that hard. So yeah…Christmas shopping was a bit of a scramble, but it’s done. Now I get to find out how I did.
And now it’s time to do the quadruple-decker Christmas festivities. I’m sure they will be a mix of happy, funny, and a little sad since this is the first Christmas without Steve’s grandpa. He was always such a big part of Christmas. But I guess we’ll make new memories.
Hopefully, after we survive the holidays, I’ll be able to write more things. I am full of ideas. I just can’t seem to find the time or the mental focus to pull it off. I can only hope I’ll do better next year.
I hope everyone is having a good holiday, whatever you celebrate. Oooo! Here’s another song that should be much happier than the other one.
Have a good one. Try to stay sane.