Christmas Fruits

Around Christmas time you hear most people call out ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other. We do that too, when we’re outside. In the house, we constantly keep reminding each other to act natural and look inconspicuous, like we have nothing to hide. That’s because we have a seriously shrewd mother. And surprising our mom with Christmas gifts is hard.

As children she always hid our Christmas holiday gifts and we didn’t know until Christmas day what we were going to get. If anyone was lucky, they’d have a faint idea of one gift but that’s the closest we ever got. And our Christmas gifts were always great. Mom not only knew what we wanted, but she also managed to smuggle it in the house and wrap it with out us so much as seeing the corner of a box. So when we grew up and started college or jobs, we thought it was only fair we get the world’s best most unique Christmas gifts for mom, and not let her find out about them till Christmas day. Oh yeah, I’m talking major payback time for mommy. So while we plan, purchase and wrap mom’s Christmas gifts, we try to be as subtle as possible.

But mom knows, mom always knows. We’ve tried all sorts of headquarters for our ‘Surprise Mom on Christmas’ plan, our house, my sister’s apartment, my brother’s place, my place, the beach, the bar. Sometimes I think mom must at some point have worked for the FBI. Luck and common sense aren’t exactly on our side either. Last year we ordered some Christmas gift baskets and one of them was for mom. There was a mix up and they delivered it to our house instead of my place. So basically mom received the delivery of her own Christmas gift. She still acted surprise though. The year before that, my brother called my dad and left him a long message on the answering machine. The message was entirely about mom’s Christmas gifts. He conveniently forgot that our parents live in the same house. Mom heard the message before dad did. In the years before that, mom has one way or the other managed to stumble upon our Christmas gifts for her. The sad part is she doesn’t even try to find out what her Christmas gifts are and she still finds them. We are lame at keeping Christmas gifts a secret. So this year, my mom already knows about the necklace my sister is getting for her and the coat my brother got for her. I’m getting her a fruit bouquet that I ordered online. Mom doesn’t know about it yet, I think It doesn’t need to be wrapped and it will arrive a day before Christmas. I change the password on my computer every day now. I hope I can keep it a secret from my mom till Christmas.

Last year my friend and neighbor had a baby in December. Coincidently she had it the same day as her own birthday. So now Mom and baby boy share birthdays. I remember the days after she had her baby.

Since it was December, everyone was gearing up for the big Christmas holiday. They had been shopping for Christmas gifts mostly and with the arrival of the baby, everyone started bringing over balloons and flowers for the new mother. The flowers weren’t allowed in case the baby was allergic so my friend’s hospital room and then her living and bedroom were steadily filled with those shiny helium balloons. Around Christmas finding unique Christmas gifts is hard enough, finding something for a new born baby was harder. I tried to find something online that would be appropriate for both Christmas and for a new mother but the websites and store shelves all had Christmas holiday gifts but nothing to befit the occasion.

I knew if I looked specifically for baby gifts, I’d find them, but it was the baby’s first Christmas in his new home and it was my friend’s first Christmas as a mommy. I wanted something that would say congrats on your baby and Merry Christmas. There aren’t a lot of Christmas gifts out there that say that. I know flowers would have done great but we were all being careful around the baby who wasn’t even a month old yet. In my search for a gift for my friend I found a beautiful fruit bouquet. It was fruit cut like flowers and dipped in chocolate. I found the perfect bouquet for my friend. And I also found these adorable reindeer socks for the baby with little jingle bells on them. My friend absolutely loved both the gifts.

I’m one of those fortunate people who have a really great boss. I mean the guy literally remembers’ everyone’s birthdays! He knows if someone’s mother is sick and will ask about her health. He’ll know who just had a baby and ask how the wife is doing. He works us to the bone, but the work gets done because he has such a great attitude with us.

I think the formula behind it is simple. As long as our boss is happy and confident in us, we feel like everything is going great. So this Christmas is beginning to look like a real bummer at work. My boss is not well. He had surgery and although he’s back in the office, the surgery, medicine and drugs have made him down right miserable. We all can’t wait for him to get back to his jolly old self. It’s a bit funny you know; everyday someone will go in and try to cheer him up. We’ve brought him about five Christmas fruit baskets so far. When he yells at us and tells us to get back to work, we don’t mind. He’s been a great boss all these years, what’s a little crankiness? He’ll get back in to the Christmas spirit soon. He usually starts the secret Santa thing. He loves buying and receiving Christmas gifts, so his mood is going to get better as December progresses.

So far the number of people who have been thrown out of his office is six; I’m going tomorrow with a few Christmas gifts for him from the whole office. I mean it’s just a little post surgery misery, and Christmas holiday gifts can cure that. One of the unique Christmas gifts I’ll be taking for him tomorrow is a fruit bouquet. About five of us pitched in to buy it for our boss and I know it’ll really improve his mood. Surgery or no surgery, fresh fruit with chocolate sauce can melt anyone.

I seriously love chocolate. I know everyone thinks stuff like the discovery of fire, and inventing the wheel is huge, but I think the people who found cocoa beans deserve a Nobel Prize too. I mean one of the best things about the holidays is that people send chocolate like nuts! I get lots and lots of chocolate around Christmas. In case I feel like I haven’t received enough chocolate I’ll go out and buy myself some.

I guess it’s easy to guess which Christmas gifts are my favorite, chocolate ones! I mean I like the other stuff too, but I just prefer that people get me Christmas gift baskets full of something chocolaty instead of Christmas gift baskets with cheese in them. I mean hello, I’m not a mouse you know! Since I like chocolate so much, I also gift a lot of chocolate. Most of my Christmas holiday gifts are chocolate gifts. And while I graciously accept any and all kinds of chocolate stuff, my sister, who is just as much of a chocolate fanatic as I am, is absolutely picky! In fact, she’s practically a snob to most chocolates. Getting her unique Christmas gifts is hard, there are only a few select types of chocolates she’ll eat and I want her gift to be a surprise. This year I’m going to deviate a bit from an all chocolate gift. I’m buying a fruit bouquet for her, it comes with chocolate sauce, the fruit is dipped in chocolate and I think she’ll absolutely love it. I’d like to see her pass over the fresh fruit with chocolate. I know she won’t be able to and if she does, I’ll accept a refund.

I am the mother of two teenagers. I see my kids in the morning when they’re chugging down their breakfast, I see the top of their heads as I drive them to school and they're on their cell phones tweeting away about God knows what and we occasionally run into each other near the TV set.

All of this changes completely around Christmas time. My kids will deliberately walk into the kitchen while I’m cooking and hold long, loud and pointed conversations with their friends on the phone about their Christmas gifts. What they want, what they really want and what they can’t live without. Basically they’re trying to tell me what Christmas holiday gifts to get them, and the order of preference. For kids who avoid the kitchen like the plague, and whose fingers are still typing away at imaginary keyboards in their sleep, they make way too many calls in my kitchen. You’d think they’d have realized by now that I don’t ever get them the stuff they ‘can’t live without’. It’s too ridiculously extravagant and expensive. I just don’t think teenagers need that kind of stuff.

You could literally feed a third world country for a month for the price of those designer bags or cell phones. I never thought it would be this hard to teach my kid humility. I only get them the Christmas gifts they want and not the ones they ‘can’t live without’. If they can’t live without things like handbags and digital camera, they have bigger things to worry about. Hopefully one day they will learn to appreciate unique Christmas gifts for the sentiments they’re given with and not the price tags they carried. I think the problem is they don’t really know what they want. The TV tells them what to buy. I’ve been buying Christmas gifts for my kids for years now. They love everything they get and no one can say they didn’t get the one present they couldn’t live without. My daughter even loves the Christmas gift baskets I buy. While the whole wide world is out there telling my daughter to buy torn jeans and charm bracelets, I’m introducing her to more wholesome gifts like the fruits for Christmas. I’ve received Christmas Fruits from my mother for many years now and I really cherish the gift. It’s one gift I know my daughter will absolutely love.

For a girl I’m pretty handy around the house. I can fix a blown fuse and even tackle those leaking pipes under the sink. It’s something that comes with having no brothers and a father with a bad back. For some reason my boyfriend thinks it earns me the title of a super girlfriend or something. I can even tinker around the car and I know what he’s taking about when he’s under the hood of his car. Naturally I feel very flattered.

Unfortunately he thinks that I know how to do this stuff out of interest instead of necessity. So on my birthday or any other occasion, he’ll always slip in some sort of hardware with my gifts. His Christmas gifts follow the same principle. Like two years ago he filled my Christmas stocking with nuts and bolts. Not hardware nuts but actual nuts like walnuts and stuff but he mixed it up with actual bolts! I had to sift through those bolts and pick out the eatables nuts. It weighed so much that my Christmas stocking broke off the mantle and I chipped a finger nail cleaning up the mess! After that I sat him down and gave him a crash course in Christmas holiday gifts for you girlfriend. I told him clearly that even if I was a lumberjack or a truck driver, I’d want romantic Christmas gifts.

I didn’t want to wake up to a mess of shells and bolts on Christmas day. I told him in elaborate detail what a romantic or sentimental gift is. Of course I said price didn’t matter, as long as the Christmas holiday gifts said I love you and stuff. I said I didn’t want any jewelry because it was just too much of a cliché romantic gift. Then I told him he had to find unique Christmas gifts for me instead of just buying the first thing some pretty girl behind the counter pointed out. He said he was pretty confident no other woman on earth had received nuts and bolts on Christmas day. He was right of course and that was why we were having this discussion. Last year he got me one of those Christmas gift baskets but it was filled with hardware catalogs and even the whole ‘home Improvement’ series on DVD and a fruit bouquet that had fruit cut and arranged to look like flowers with chocolate sauce. Well I guess edible Christmas gifts are a good start. The fruit bouquet was absolutely gorgeous. I think it was an original way to make Christmas fruits into a gift. After we had enjoyed the bouquet he insisted we watch the whole ‘Home Improvement’ series. He’s getting there but very slowly.

Last year I spent Christmas at my sister’s house. She has three kids aged between three and ten. And those kids are fast not to mention oddly squishy. They can crawl under and into just about anything when they’re looking for the Christmas gifts. So last year when I arrived at my sister’s place I was already in stealth mode. For those of you not familiar with the Hit man Game, stealth mode is basically me sneaking around my sister’s house trying to hide something. That something would be Christmas gifts.

I moved into the house when the kids were out playing and my sister helped me hide my Christmas holiday gifts. This wasn’t easy because all the good places were already housing my sister’s Christmas gifts for her family. I actually had to hide some of my smaller Christmas gifts under a loose floor board in the attic. Then there were the Christmas gifts waiting to be wrapped. They included most of my Christmas gifts for my sister so she found out what I was getting her. All surprise was instantly killed and I realized that my hours of shopping for unique Christmas gifts for everyone would amount to nothing when it came to my sister’s gift.

I suspect she even took the one gift I had managed to wrap and shook it to get an idea of what’s inside. Brought me memories of kindergarten, my teacher used to tell us it was very rude to shake a gift before opening it. The house looked more like ‘Operation hides Christmas gifts’ than anything. What I didn’t like was the fact that none of my gifts for my sister would be a surprise. There was only one way around it; super stealth mode (not featured in hit man). I went online and searched for something that could be delivered to my sister’s doorstep as close to Christmas as possible. It had to be something that didn’t need wrapping. There were a lot of Christmas gift baskets out there but they would deliver at least a week before Christmas and the wicker baskets were too big to hide anywhere. I finally stumbled on to these fruit bouquets. They were available in a lot of sizes. They were pretty unique and beautiful to look at. I ordered the small size and asked a neighbor if she’d store it for just one night. Everything worked out! My sister couldn’t close her surprised mouth! She absolutely loved the gift.

Last year I was baking some Christmas cookies and watching my three year old play. I was momentarily distracted when I had to answer the door. When I came back into the kitchen, my three year old had snuck over to the counter, climbed a chair, by passed the cookie jar and found one of his Christmas gifts.

When I cam back to the kitchen he was sitting on the floor peeling the wrapping off. I was absolutely shocked. I had hid it behind the cookie jar for the very reason that he’d be more interested in the cookies than what was behind the cookies, should he ever manage to reach either one of them. So as I stood in the kitchen in utter amazement, my son continued to peel away the wrapping. He was only three and there are just so many things you can say to a three year old.

I took the gift from him and hid it again. He didn’t cry about not being able to open an early Christmas gift and I thought he was ashamed at being caught sneaking early Christmas holiday gifts. I sat him down on the sofa and asked him in a very reasonable voice if he really thought his Christmas gifts would make him just as happy if they weren’t opened on Christmas day. His answer left me speechless. He said I should let him open one or two and we could both find out if he was happier that way! I was actually shocked that an answer like that had come out of a three old, my three old! I tried to reason with him, I told him how hard mommy tries to find unique Christmas gifts for him and that she wants to give him lots of nice surprises on Christmas day. He told me I was trying to concentrate his happiness.

At work there are generally two types of bad situations. One is when you don’t have anything to do and the other is when you have too much to do and you just can’t get started. Now imagine any of those situations in December, with the weight of your Christmas shopping list crushing you. If you’re anything like me you’ll be staring at a blank screen and just wondering why on earth you got out of bed. The answer is obvious; you kept dreaming your Christmas gifts were chasing you.

My Christmas nightmares start when thanksgiving ends. I think I could do about ten sequels to ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’. I’m chased by wrapping paper and scissors alike, when I have my routine falling dream, there is a festive background instead of the sky. There is only one way to make these nightmares disappear, I have to woman-up and get down to buying my Christmas Holiday Gifts. I know that once I get into my Christmas Shopping mood, the shopping will be done in mere days. The problem is getting into the mood. For me it starts with finding a really great gift. During my search for unique Christmas gifts, the second I find something really extraordinary the Christmas sprit, shopping or otherwise, fills me. I am immediately inspired and I zero-in on the best deals with in miles. I find the best Christmas gift baskets and Christmas ornaments at great prices. I find a nice dress for the Christmas party and even better shoes to go with it. Then I find something for my mom and most importantly my boyfriend. It’s all about getting inspired.

Christmas is in twenty four days, that is less than a month and surprisingly (not really), there is still unfinished Christmas shopping. I still have tons and tons of Christmas Gifts to buy. I read somewhere that people mostly begin shopping for Christmas gifts after thanksgiving. Since I had already bought some gifts before thanksgiving, I was definitely feeling smug. But all smugness is now gone, it’s December! Now that there is the added pressure of less time, I realize I haven’t in any seriousness started my Christmas Shopping. On top of all that, my list actually got longer because I missed a few people at work.

It’s beginning to turn into another stressful Christmas. The stores have run out of my favorite metallic wrapping paper. I love that stuff so much, it makes ordinary stuff look extraordinary. It comes in handy if in a serious time crunch I don’t manage to find unique Christmas gifts for some people. I just wrap the ordinary Christmas holiday gifts in metallic paper. People look at the wrapping and are flattered.

Something I’ll always be grateful for is Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I was wondering if I should have bought my Christmas gift baskets earlier but I came across some great discounts on Cyber Monday so I’ll be saving a ton. In fact, I’d say Cyber Monday made it a bit easier for me to find some really Unique Christmas gifts. I’m going with my usual chocolate fruit for the people at work; it’s the only way I’ll manage to stay in budget.