Bragging rights?

I'm done shopping.*  I wrapped nine of the boys' gifts over the weekend, and placed them under the tree.  Unfortunately, those nine comprise all of the boys' gifts.  We've officially entered that depressing phase of parenting where the gifts desired are so expensive that what used to be a morning-long free-for-all has now been reduced to a wham-bam-thank-you-and-now-I'll-take-my-expensive-electronics-to-the-corner-and-be-antisocial-ma'am event.

Or, we're very near that.  I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.

Somewhere along the winding road of my childhood, my mother stopped putting tags on Christmas gifts.  I choose to think that it was a predetermined course of action in a war against particularly bright children who could touch and feel and shake and guess the contents of everything under her tree, but we'll never know.  At some point in the not-too distant past, I decided to employ this strategy to deter the exceedingly bright children who can touch and feel and shake and guess the contents of everything under my tree.

It drove them crazy.  And I mean crazy.  They were furious.

The Wonder Hub and I, we loved it.  We loved it so much that we developed variations on the theme.  One year he put numbers on packages.  The children spent hours trying to break his code, which was nothing more than this:  three digit numbers for the youngest, four digits for the middle, five for the oldest.

They were furious.

We, of course, loved it.

So this year, with three measly gifts apiece, I was at a loss.  In the end, I wrapped each child's gifts in a particular paper, which I knew they would easily figure out.  Except.  Except that I threw in one little twist that would throw them for sure.

Yes, this is how I do it.

Martha, eat your heart out.

It was such a great twist that five days later, after I had wrapped the WH's gifts (and one, little tiny additional gift per boy, 'cause I'm a sucker), I couldn't, for the ever-loving life of me, remember which wrapping paper belonged to which kid.

I sat on the floor in front of the lit tree, touching, feeling, shaking.  No clue.  What's more, I couldn't remember the twist.  What exactly had I done?  It was so breathtakingly brilliant that I just couldn't pull it from the dark recesses of my brain.

Sigh.

In the end, I unwrapped and re-wrapped every. single. gift.

And then I put tags on them.






*for Christmas, not forever, dear husband.