{"id":280,"date":"2006-11-16T12:57:50","date_gmt":"2006-11-16T19:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/?p=280"},"modified":"2006-11-17T11:36:06","modified_gmt":"2006-11-17T18:36:06","slug":"premature-merriment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/?p=280","title":{"rendered":"Premature Merriment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This will come as little surprise to most of you I&#8217;m sure, but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m a really firm believer in the idea that the Christmas season doesn&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;m all for gingerbread lattes and cranberry bliss bars, but how did they decide that November 9 marked the official start of the season?<\/p>\n<p>So you can imagine my reaction when GTB asked me a few days ago what I want for Christmas. &#8220;Ask me on November 24th,&#8221; I told him. &#8220;I don&#8217;t start thinking about Christmas before then.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Well my family is already thinking about it, and if you want a present from them, you need to give them a list!&#8221; he threateningly replied.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t remember how, but I got out of the conversation without handing over my wants and needs for the rest of the year. Phew.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;I like fuzzy socks and lavendar bath stuff&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>There it was; he got it out of me. On November FUCKING 16th. I hung up kinda shaken and stunned. <\/p>\n<p>Several minutes later, I got an email from him. He&#8217;d sent it to me, his sister, and his mother. It was his amazon.com wish list. I looked at it&#8211;yep, good list&#8211;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 &#8220;GTB&#8221; folder, I won&#8217;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&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;m marrying not only a man who is like this, but into an entire family who is. <\/p>\n<p>Crap. Crap. Crap!<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Yup, it&#8217;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&#8230;his mother&#8217;s list. Something about the apple not falling far from the tree&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This will come as little surprise to most of you I&#8217;m sure, but&#8230; I&#8217;m a really firm believer in the idea that the Christmas season doesn&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}