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December 18, 2008
Temptations
Today in the mail a package arrived. From my sister. Uh-oh. This wasn't going to be any good.
I knew that the package had our Christmas gifts inside. O and I won't be seeing my parents or sister/brother-in-law for the holidays because we will be up here in (snowy and cold) PA and they will be in warm, sunny places.
So all the gifts from my side of the family were sent this year.
Well you see the problem is, I am a snoop. Always have been when it comes to Christmas gifts. I can remember sneaking up to my parent's closet when I was a wee one (okay, when I was in high school too...) and trying to find my gifts. Surprises don't do much for me. Oh, and I'm impatient too. Sooo...I WANT TO KNOW WHAT MY GIFTS ARE NOW!
I'm so bad.
Well my mom wised up and would immediately wrap the gifts as she bought them. But that didn't keep me up using my voo-doo tricks to carefully unwrap a corner (or two) and see what was inside before even more carefully taping it all back up without a trace...
Fast forward to 2008. Funny story.
When O and I saw my parents for Thanksgiving my mom gave us our Christmas gifts because they were big and bulky and she didn't want to have to send them in the mail. And of course she gave stern warnings that opening these gifts early would result in HEAVY penalties.
Quite frankly she didn't scare me.
But still, I wanted to be good and not open until I was supposed to. Or at least wait for Christmas Eve. Or at least the WEEK of Christmas.
So the whole longggg car ride home from North Carolina on the Saturday after Thanksgiving I stared at those gifts. I wonder what they could be? O's was really big. I couldn't imagine what could be that large. Maybe I should just sneak a peak. Nobody would know...
And then it happened. As O was carrying the gifts in from the car when we FINALLY got home, he dropped my gift on the sidewalk. Might have been because he was carrying about 10,000 things at once. Either way, this was very exciting!
Because now I definitely had a reason to open the gift. I mean first of all, the wrapping was all ripped up anyway and more importantly what if he had damaged the gift when he dropped it?! I mean really! I had to check to make sure it was okay right? That was the only smart thing to do. (and no, I didn't pay O to drop the gift)
So I opened it. About 4 weeks early. :)
And once I SAW what it was, there was NO WAY IN THE WORLD I was going to wrap it back up and wait until Christmas. It was a new laptop! Oh dear Lord did I need that bad. My old one was kind of...well...not too good. Slow. Oh, and I broke the spacebar when we were in Tempe so typing was a bit of an issue. Go ahead, try to type on a computer with no spacebar. My parents knew of my computer woes and knew of my plan to try my hand at this new business so they decided a new computer was in order so I had proper equipment.
Seriously, that was the bomb.
And even though I was wayyyyyy tired that Saturday night from driving all that way home, I still stayed up and set up the computer and was in 7th heaven to have such a fine machine to call my own!
Well anyway, this left O feeling left out. Because now that I knew what my gift was, he wanted to know what his was too. So he also opened early. We are BOTH so bad.
Of course the issue was, how now to tell my parents of our transgressions? I couldn't keep the fact that I LOVED the new computer to myself for the next 4 weeks. That, and the guilt of what we had done would have eaten me alive. So the next weekend when I called my parents to say hi, I fessed up.
My mom was not in the least bit surprised. In fact her only surprise was that we didn't open the gifts up IN the car and waited all the way until we got home. :)
And that brings me back to the package that arrived in the mail from my sister today. It's sitting downstairs on the kitchen table and I am upstairs trying very hard not to think about it. Christmas is only 1 week away. Can I do it? I guess only time will tell. But I may have to ask O to hide the gifts from me when he gets home.
Ugh...temptations... :)
Posted by beth at December 18, 2008 3:09 PM
Comments
Haha. I can't resist either. There are a few I know what they are and they can wait, it's the others I have to open now.
Posted by: Maggs at December 18, 2008 4:32 PM
I HATE having to wait to open presents too! You are tough though, you can make it one week!
Posted by: maija at December 18, 2008 6:14 PM
For you its a present downstairs. For me, its an unopened tray of sushi... :) Good luck with the temptation thing... yeah, I was a bit of a snoop myself, until one year there were NO presents to snoop for - my parents had given them to our neighbor to keep until the day before Christmas. My sister and I were on our BEST behavior!
Posted by: marit c-l at December 19, 2008 11:14 AM
So what was Oscar's very big present?
Posted by: Bri Gaal at December 19, 2008 1:23 PM