Giving

Rojo is super excited for Santa to come Saturday night, we've been counting down since the minute we put away the Halloween decorations. For the last few rounds of birthdays Rojo has been grabbing one of his beloved "friends" from the top bunk, shoving it into a gift bag, letting the recipient open it, "have" it for some specified amount of time (usually a couple of hours), then asking that they return it.

This year he's decided to take the giving idea and apply it to Christmas, too. He dragged me to Bi-Mart in late November to buy a gift for Elmo. "Elmo wants gummy bears for Christmas." We headed to the Christmas candy aisle and he decided to do all his shopping in that very spot. Within five minutes we'd covered his aunt, Papa, Grandma, Grammy, Woohoo, and STM. He nagged and nagged until I wrapped them, and they were amongst the first packages under our tree.

Yesterday STM called Rojo and asked, "Do you have a present for Mom, or do you need me to take you shopping?"

"No, I've got it, STM, I have Care's present all ready."

Hung up the phone and turned to me, "Care, will you help me wrap your present? But you can't look. You need to be surprised."

I found a big box, he ran upstairs and grabbed the three friends while I held the box open, eyes closed, then he put the lid back on. We went down to the ping pong table in the basement and wrapped it together.

To: Care
From: Rojo

We tied a green ribbon around the red and white polka dot paper, and put it under the tree.

Then the relentless quest to pin down the exact moment I would open it, began, with a fervor. With some amount of doing I managed to put him off for almost 24-hours, agreeing to open it today when Kathleen came by for our annual three-way gift exchange.

Minute that poor woman sat down (before she even got to taste the coffee or eggnog he insisted we have ready for her), he had me opening the gift.

"Never trust the box," he said as I peeled back the paper to reveal a box that said gala apples. When I pulled out friends 1, 2 and 3 nobody was more tickled than he. I think he thought I was genuinely surprised. I think he thought he'd really pulled a major gift-giving coup. I think he thought right.