Hostess gifts are rarely seen outside of the holiday season among my generation. Come to think of it, they are rarely seen inside the holiday season as well. Our grandmothers would cringe to see that young women these days attend a party at a friend’s home and show up with nothing but a bottle of wine for themselves. Maybe you occasionally bring an appetiser or a dessert to share, but I say that’s not enough. Our grandmothers would bring gifts for their hostess to thank her for inviting them, for decorating and creating a relaxing atmosphere, for food, wine and the occasional party favour and, most importantly, for letting them have a fun evening without all the pesky cleaning up to do afterwards. I think it’s high time to bring back the hostess gift! At least at the bigger Christmas parties ladies.
Gifts
Paper Anniversary
My husband and I are approaching our paper anniversary this weekend and I, for one, am very excited. Throughout our decade long courtship, we would get each other what ever little gift caught our fancy to commemorate the day we started dating until the tedious strangeness of shopping without each other and the difficulty of keeping the gift a secret got the better of us and we just stopped buying gifts. We didn’t stop acknowledging the day, but around year six, it started feeling odd and immature to celebrate a day neither of us could fully remember, and which bore little significance to our lives. It wasn’t like we were celebrating a thoughtful commitment, we were celebrating the day that he ask me a “rhetorical question” and I said something like, “yeah, sure.” This is why I was very excited to start the anniversary counter back to zero when we got married. I continue to be excited for being able to choose a meaningful gift based on tradition instead of a useless gift based on my panicked ideas the day I realize our anniversary is tomorrow. I am determined to stick to the traditional gifts due at every marriage milestone, not only because I think it will be fun, but also because I get teary eyed thinking about exchanging gold with my beloved husband 49 years from now. Continue reading
Tips for Holiday Birthdays
Having a birthday that, defying the principles of probability, seems to fall on the same weekend as Valentine’s Day every year, a father born on Christmas Eve, a brother born on Devil’s Night, and a mother and husband born the same week in April, increasing the odds that at least one of their birthdays will fall on the Easter weekend, I know a thing or two about the troubles of a holiday birthday. Continue reading
What Your Beloved Nerd Wants for Christmas
These days just about everybody loves at least one nerd. In many ways this is quite advantageous; you never have to worry about how you’re going to hook up that lovely new entertainment system when you get it home, how you’re going to recover a decade’s worth of pictures when your hard-drive bursts into flames* or what to do when the twenty page document you just spent the last month writing won’t print. This relationship, however, can become troubling at Christmas time when you realize you have no idea what this person would like or how to even find the things they’ve told you they would like. Sometimes I wonder if my husband has written his Christmas list in pseudo-jargon just to mess with me. Despite wish lists that might as well be written in a different language and my outright inability to understand technology, over the last ten years with my nerd, I’ve learned how to make him happy on Christmas morning. Continue reading