Christmas presents......

This year's Christmas present shopping has been a little bit of an experiment.
Every year for many years I've approached present shopping with the obsessive nature that surprises no-one that knows me. There are lists, there are tick sheets.

I usually start the listing process in October and aim to have everything done by early December. Every year I always say to myself in the week before Christmas that I should have waited to see if I could have taken advantage of the numerous pre-Christmas sales that always seem to spring up around this time as more and more retailers are realising that their Christmas sales projections are about as likely to be met as i am to bump into a big fat man in a red suit and a set of reindeers up on my roof.

So every year, sometime in Novemeber I start the actual shopping. Most of it, for the past few years has been done online in one form or another. I love online shopping. I love the sheer convenience of it. I am extremely guilty about depriving bricks and mortar shops of my hard earned cash, but the online experience is just such a pleasure. Once all the online stuff is done, there's normally just a little bit of personal stuff to get.

I'm extremely lucky really that my Christmas present personal list is extremely small:
Molly
Louise
My Mom and Dad.
That's it.
Yet somehow, this tiny little list always gives me trouble.

This year it's all done, all the presents, all the cards, all the giftwrap and I managed to do all of it in a combination of online and shopping locally in Pocklington. This was the plan. No going to the big supermarkets, no going into York and fighting the hordes of Christmas tourists. Everything would be either online or local.

Now I can relax and enjoy Christmas. Yay!