Early Christmas shopping

Throughout and even after college I stopped buying individual Christmas and birthday gifts for my family. With 10 siblings, it just wasn't affordable. My brother and I did go in on a few group gifts both during and after college, but that was it.

So, now that I'm married and financially stable, Christmas shopping is back on the table. I'm still not ready to tackle birthdays just yet, but the nature of Christmas being a one-time event makes things much easier.

My wife and I (emphasis on "my wife") resolved that we would try to have our shopping done by December. For two people who often put things off until the last minute, it was ambitious. I guess you could say that it's part of a larger goal of ours to be more regularly on time, ahead of schedule, prepared, etc.

A few weeks ago we walked over to the Mall of America (we can see it from our apartment building half a block away) and found gifts for most of my siblings. Gifts for the rest of my family were knocked out last week at stores in San Antonio, the Denver airport, and a Denver area Target. Jamie has been working on gifts for her famly over the last few weeks and yesterday she made her final purchase.

We finished our Christmas shopping on November 30th. And over half of the presents are already wrapped!! (That was my wife's doing...I probably would have put off wrapping them until Christmas Eve, whereupon I would have found the darkest plastic bags, triple-bagged them so you couldn't see through, and presented my gifts in bundles of crinkly, balled up plastic to my family on Christmas Day.)

Considering that this is our first crack at Christmas shopping as a married couple and that we're still DINKs, this tradition may be short-lived. But I'm going to live in the now, and boy does it feel good!