It's Always Christmas At The Poderosa!

It's now been over a month since the Christmas holidays. It's over and forgotten with and I'm happily trekking my way through a new year.

Well, it's over and forgotten everywhere but at the Poderosa.

See, I seem to keep finding remnants of Christmas around here.

Right after the holidays, my dennette, aka the small heatless room with a lot of record albums, a TV, and a computer, was chockfull of everything I'd gotten for Christmas. Let's see, I plugged in and set up the cordless phone, and put the (wonderful, wonderful, thanks, Mom) ultra-plush bath towels I got away. But everything else was in bags and boxes sitting right there in the floor, displayed like the crown jewels, for anyone who came to visit but no one ever did.

Finally, sometime after the New Year (that whole time was a little, ahem, hazy for me, remember) I decided it was absolutely useless and ridiculous for me to have my Christmas swag sitting in the floor of my den in bags. So I moved all the bags to the floor of my spare bedroom, where I could close the door on the whole affair.

Right around the time of the moving, I noticed a blue plastic bag slung around the bannister on my dennette steppette. (a bannister for one step. go figure.) Anyway, I looked inside it and said, "Oh, crap." It was my pre-Christmas Avon order, all stocking stuffers: lotions, hand creams, chapsticks, eyeliners, etc. So here I go the week after Christmas distributing little things of no importance to people I forgot to give things to. It was so nice: "Here, sorry I forgot about your damn stocking during the holidays, here's something." (*whack!* as I throw it at them)

Last week I was feeling rather adventurous, so I decided to try to attack the spare bedroom with full force. Which I did, for a while, till I lost interest. After the putting away of the wrapping paper and gift bags, I finally started unloading stuff (yes, I'd not touched the other gifts I'd gotten till now) and finding places to put it all. In doing that, I found another bag.

Yep, you guessed it. Full of stocking stuffers. Toys this time. Rubber stamps, figurines, key chains, all kinds of stuff. This time I just passed it round to whoever I thought might be interested (my sister got most of it this time).

After I cleared a main path through the room I gave up for a while, until this past weekend, when I tried to take one more stab and things and see if I could finish up (I finally did). On this foray to Christmasland I found something completely different. A gift bag I'd forgotten to put up. I picked it up to take the tissue paper out of it and realized this wasn't an empty bag. I looked in it.

It was a gift. To me. From Jacob and her husband. From Christmas. Christmas 2002, that is.

Inside was a bath spongie and some nice body wash, and a really cute box with kitties on it that was made like a Chinese restaurant take-away box. I opened it up and inside was a gift card from Target. Now, I vaguely remember getting this lo those many years ago, in 2002, but this is what happens when you're me and you have a pea brain and life just happens and you forget things.

And so yesterday I got on the phone and made a big donkey of myself calling the Target people and asking them about this card I was holding. Hell, I figured it would expire after a year, but had no idea, and thought "why not see?" Believe it or not, they were surprisingly nice, and if they did think I was a big donkey, they certainly didn't say so, and told me that a gift card never runs out, and mine was for $30.

So thank you Jacob and Mr Jacob. It's not that I didn't appreciate your Christmas gift year before last; it's just that I'm a pea-brain who forgot about it. Now I get to think about the free stuff I get to buy.

It's Christmas all over again!

(PS - all this cleaning also included my going through my own stocking again and putting up my goods. It brought back memories of my sister and I on Christmas, going through our stockings together, laughing at what our Mom put in there. Now, don't get me wrong, they're wonderfully useful little items. But we got Rolaids, Soltice, travel shampoo (Head & Shoulders), travel toothpaste, travel Scope, travel deodorants... We said, "OK, according to our mom, we're old, can't hold our food, have arthritis, smell, have dandruff, need to brush our teeth, and have bad breath. Thanks, Mom!")