Otherwise known as Christmas shopping.
In an attempt to support local businesses, I decide not to do it online and instead brave the high street. It’s mayhem. Stores are awash with sequins and frazzled shoppers and heated to about a hundred degrees, so I’m forever taking my coat on and off as I dive in and out of different stores trying to tick anything off my list.
Still, there are pluses. You don’t get all that festive buzz if you’re at home ordering online, do you? Though truth be told, I’m not encountering much festive buzz in the aisles of our local department store. Though I do encounter quite a few worried-looking men as they hear a salesperson breaking it to them in hushed tones that they’ve sold out of scented candles.
I’m sympathetic. I’m not having it easy either, but husbands and boyfriends seem to have it much harder when it comes to knowing what to buy at Christmas. Upstairs I spot someone’s husband looking at a set of pans and know there is going to be an extremely disappointed wife out there somewhere. No woman, however practical they might be, wants to wake up to a gift-wrapped frying pan on Christmas morning. I think it was Liza who always used to say that presents should come in small packages.
I sidle over and guide him towards the Le Creuset. Well, if it’s going to be pans, it might as well be expensive ones.
Every year I try to be imaginative with my Christmas presents. Unlike Rich, who always does vouchers and always seems to get away with it. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help thinking vouchers are a last resort. Last year I got the whole family those DNA tests, which I thought was really cool, until I read an article about all these people discovering more than they bargained for. Less ‘ten per cent Iberian Peninsula’ and more ‘my mother had an affair with the postman and he’s my real dad’.
I had a bit of a wobble. ‘Are you serious?’ laughed my brother, pointing to our noses when I mentioned it to him. ‘Sis, I don’t think we have to worry about DNA.’ There’s no denying we have both inherited what is known in the family as ‘The Stevens Nose’, and he argued that we didn’t need a test to prove it.
Though it did, of course. Together with the fact my mother is one per cent Neanderthal, which my father has never let her live down.
However, this year is proving a bit more difficult. Mum and Dad buy everything they want as soon as they want it, and I’ve racked my brain for what to get Freddy, my godson. What on earth do ten-year-old boys like these days? Other than terrorizing babysitters, and I’m not sure you can find that in a size small. Plus, I can’t find all the other stuff on my list.
I wonder if they sell vouchers?
I’m grateful for: