Another holiday season has come and gone, and I got a failing grade again in Creative Christmas Shopping.
Calling it shopping is a stretch. I pick up a few gifts for Regina, and she searches stores and combs the internet for numerous presents for everybody else in the family.
She is not fussy about gifts for Christmas and other occasions and has learned to have limited expectations.
Her only request is for some surprises under the tree. The only Christmas I managed that was the first year we were together.
All those Christmases since then, she has gotten pretty much the same thing every year. She said she liked the gifts the first time, so she keeps getting them.
It seems to frustrate her some, but change is hard for folks my age. If we go to a restaurant and the fried shrimp dinner is good, I get fried shrimp every time we go back.
It’s embarrassing that when we open gifts on Christmas Eve, she looks at the shape of packages and announces what the presents are before unwrapping them.
“This must be my collector Santa,” she says, or “Oh, good, this is the body lotion. I’m about out of last year’s fragrance.”
She knows some Ugg waterproof boots are in the shoebox-size package. They were a big hit the Christmas after we married but will just go in a closet now with other pairs almost like them.
Online shopping is beyond my technology skills, so Regina never suggested that I should get her anything from Lululemon. But there is a Lululemon store in Shreveport now, and she mentioned a couple of things there she would like.
A big item at Lululemon is skin tight workout pants for ladies. They call them yoga pants. Regina does not do yoga, but she liked the pants so I got her some and a Lululemon yoga mat to go with them.
If she had told me about Lululemon earlier, it would have saved a lot of time shopping. We set a spending limit on our gifts for each other, and you can get to the limit in a hurry at Lululemon.
As she was opening her collector Santa this year, I looked around at the decorations and noticed that there were just a couple of Santas on the shelves by the fireplace. All those others were still stored in the attic.
So I flunked Christmas shopping again even after going to Google before the holidays and researching all of the new and interesting gifts that were available for ladies.
There was what was described as a personal portable concrete fireplace that looked like a coffee can with a little flame flickering at the top of it. The advertisement said it was good to warm your hands or toast marshmallows.
She likes house shoes, but I just couldn’t pull the trigger on the Sasawashi Wool Room Boots lined in fiber woven from dry washi paper and antibacterial kumazasa leaf extract.
A set of two bronze bottle openers caught my eye. One had a handle with the head of a beagle on it, and the other had a Labrador retriever. They were $150 for the set, and the advertisement suggested that they could be accompanied in the gift package with a six-pack of apple cider.
Maybe I should have gotten her that Williams Sonoma latte milk frother or the little I-pod looking device called a Muama Enence Translator that lets people communicate with each other in 43 different languages. Translations take less than two seconds.
That would have let her get through to me in 42 other languages next Christmas that she does not need any more waterproof boots or collector Santas.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES