Snow Day

While we weren’t particularly surprised when the school district called a snow day at about 8 pm last night, we were deeply, deeply pleased. We were psyched to know ahead of time so that we could sleep in. And we’d gotten the supplies we needed just in case we’d have a snow day that we could turn into a tree decoration day, and now we could swing into action with that plan.

I was also excited at the prospect of maybe, just maybe, relaxing a little bit. This didn’t actually happen. Cute W did the bulk of the snow clearing and tree-wrangling. I helped a bit. I baked three different batches of Christmas cookies (our usuals–recipes here) and pulled out Christmas decorations and ornaments.

Oh, and I shopped. I’ll say that I definitely prefer cyber-shopping to actual shopping, but the truth is that I don’t particularly love cyber-shopping, either. Today was a bit of a marathon situation, partly because I couldn’t leave the house and do anything else, anyway, and partly because I’ve learned over the years. Here is what I’ve learned: when you have two teenage girls who have relatively conventional tastes and who have been raised by a mother who really only ever likes to buy things on sale, your best bet is to just give in to Cyber Monday. Because after spending Thanksgiving getting asked by relatives about what they’d like for Christmas and being the recipient of all sorts of ads for sales on their favorite things, they have a list. But most things on that list happen to be discounted today, and an alarming percentage of those items have already sold out by the time they pass the wish list on. So it becomes this race against the clock. And when you have as many relatives who need gift ideas as I do, you learn, at long last, that sometimes the simplest thing to do is get the stuff and then figure out what’s coming from whom later. So the good news is that I got a good start on the shopping. The bad news is that it sucked up the time that I’d hoped to be spending on reading my current book (which I am enjoying very much: Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys) while snuggled under a blanket.

And we had an excellent evening of tree decorating. And here is the view from my couch.