Christmas stockings

I’m done.  Got all my Christmas shopping and out of the way.  90% of my presents are wrapped too.  I’m pretty proud of myself.  Every year I do the “next year I’ll start early and be organized” mental speech and it doesn’t work.  This year, thanks to the wonders of online shopping, I’ve accomplished this feat.  Somehow, it makes the hustle and bustle of Christmas time shopping much more fun.  I don’t have the stress of finding gifts.  I don’t need inspiration so when I voyage into an overcrowded, loud and overheated store, I can just enjoy meandering without pressure.  I’m not walking into department stores with the expectation of finding THE PERFECT GIFT! it’s got to be here! there are so many promises of this being the place to find gifts for everyone! then wandering around with a crazed look in my eye, and shifty hands waiting to spring out and rip the right gift from some other Christmas-shopping-crazed person.  Nah.  I just wander around with the look of smug self-satisfaction of having beaten the minions.

I’m only at a loss for the stocking stuffers.  I was looking at my significant other’s hung stocking, it eagerly anticipating a full-to-capacity Christmas morning and worrying that I may let that fancy navy velvet stocking down.  Its Christmas morning glory lessened, if not demolished all together, by my stocking stuffer idea ineptness.  When did stockings get so huge?  Our stockings look gigantic!  When I was growing up, my sibling and my stockings were full of mostly candy, with the occasional pencil or chapstick thrown into the sugar fest, eventually lost and forgotten in favor of solid milk chocolate Santas, cinnamon flavored candy canes and peanut butter filled bells.  The Life Savers StoryBook was a stocking stuffer staple; no matter what, there was always a Life Savers StoryBook (cherry flavor was always the last roll left in my book, it tasted like cough drops to me).  Now that I’m older and am filling a stocking for a grown man, who’s not too fond of candy, I’m at a loss.  Watch?  Highly doubtful he would use one.  Gift certificates?  My pockets will run dry by the time I fill that bottomless velvet chasm as gift cards aren’t known for their mass.  It’s not like he wears jewelry, he’s not a Magic The Gathering card collector (I hope), not big on miniature stuffed animals, cds are now outdated. 

I’m gonna have to stand up to the stocking and its expectations.  My significant other is not going to leave me ‘cause I can’t jam pack a stocking with interesting and unique trinkets.  My worth is not determined by a hung foot-covering.  I shun convention.  I may not fill it at all.

Oh my god.  What if I put a baby mouse in it?  That would be hilarious!  He’d freak out.