This will come as little surprise to most of you I’m sure, but…

I’m a really firm believer in the idea that the Christmas season doesn’t start until after Thanksgiving is over. In college, the girls in my dorm and I had an understanding that no one was allowed to play holiday music in their rooms until after we’d returned from Thanksgiving break. I get irked when stores start putting out fake Christmas trees on Halloween. I just about blew a gasket when I walked into Starbucks last week and was suddenly enveloped by Christmas-ness. I’m all for gingerbread lattes and cranberry bliss bars, but how did they decide that November 9 marked the official start of the season?

So you can imagine my reaction when GTB asked me a few days ago what I want for Christmas. “Ask me on November 24th,” I told him. “I don’t start thinking about Christmas before then.”

“Well my family is already thinking about it, and if you want a present from them, you need to give them a list!” he threateningly replied.

I don’t remember how, but I got out of the conversation without handing over my wants and needs for the rest of the year. Phew.

But then this morning at work, my phone rang. It was GTB asking yet again for my list. I sighed dramatically, explained again my disdain for this kind of early celebrating, but ultimately gave in and recited my standard “I like fuzzy socks and lavendar bath stuff” list. Then it all started tumbling out of me. There is a pair of boots I really want, and the Rome series on DVD, and I love sweaters from Anthropologie.

There it was; he got it out of me. On November FUCKING 16th. I hung up kinda shaken and stunned.

Several minutes later, I got an email from him. He’d sent it to me, his sister, and his mother. It was his amazon.com wish list. I looked at it–yep, good list–and decided to file the email away for future (i.e. sometime after November 24th) use. But then I realized that if I file that email away in my “GTB” folder, I won’t be able to find it again when I really do need it in, say, a month. So it will have to sit in my inbox until 1) I’ve bought his present, which I refuse to do yet, and 2) I can send it to my family at the appropriate time, which is to say sometime AFTER THANKSGIVING.

And thus, for this neurotic girl who lives to cross things off her to-do list, GTB has just created a to-do item that will be uncrossoffable for another six weeks. SIX WEEKS. It will just sit there, taunting me.

And the fact that he sent it to his family and that they are already asking him for my list means that his WHOLE family is this way. I’m marrying not only a man who is like this, but into an entire family who is.

Crap. Crap. Crap!

UPDATE: Yup, it’s official: the whole family IS like this. Less than 24 hours after GTB sent me his list, guess what arrived in my email inbox mere minutes ago…his mother’s list. Something about the apple not falling far from the tree….

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.