No need to move heaven and earth... Just move your bowels into the same box, spray some poo poured on it and tell him it doesn't work....
Mother-in-law decided to give us a dog for Christmas a couple of years ago. You don't give someone else a dog. We were greatly annoyed.
It's not a gift I got but one I gave. It was my first Christmas my wife and I shared. She was the youngest of 5 and the only girl. She had told me a sad story before Christmas that year about how her brothers always got GI Joes and things like that and that she hated getting dolls. Well being the Genius that I am, i thought why not remedy that. I went to a Army/Navy store. I bought her some real nice fatigues, some army boots, a canteen, a backpack,and of corse a helmet. I then proceeded to K-Mart and bought a plastic M-16. Packed it all in a beautiful package. It's at this point I decided it would be a great idea to present the gift in front of her entire family on Christmas Eve. The "gift" got loads of laughs at the gathering from everyone there, except one. From that Christmas on, she now shows me what I bought her for Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries.
I remember being in around 3rd or 4th grade and my mom was going through some health issues and couldn't work so things were tight.All of my gifts were the dollar store type toys that year and I was old enough to know how hurt they were that's the best that they could do. After that I really stopped caring about the materialistic side of it, which really isn't that important anyways.
I hate Christmas, and the "expectation" of gifts, so I typically avoid it. I have a simple rule: Don't buy me anything, because I'm not buying you anything.
After surveying the total "damage" this year of the kids toys once we all got home, I looked at my wife and just said, "this is ridiculous."
Enjoy it while you can. This year was the year my oldest started asking for make-up and clothes instead of toys. Made me sad.
I really try to get my wife to limit gifts from Santa to one decent gift, but not overly expensive, and then coloring books and other small things. Between my parents and her parents and their aunts and uncles they get an absolute obscene amount of stuff. They almost seem bored with opening presents by the end of the day.
That's us. They got three gifts from Santa, once of them a nice one. It was everyone else. We did take a ton of old toys to church for the kids area though. Pretty sure half the toys there came from our house. It's just insane.
Neither do we. Although we often will spend on home improvement or travel and joke about it being our 'gifts'.
I do, I just don't want them to be materialistic spoiled brats. Sometimes we have to combat that. I came really close to telling the boy the truth about Santa on Christmas morning because he was complaining about somethign he didn't get. I was quite angry, and we had a fun talk.
A caricature portrait of one of my sisters that looked more like her best friend in High School and College.
