I never feel any holiday spirit until the house is clean and all of the gifts are wrapped. It’s pretty normal for me to be feeling grinchy right now.

This year though… It’s just different somehow. Christmas isn’t a goal that needs to be worked toward, it’s more like a gigantic weight sitting on my shoulders and forcing me down. It’s oppressive.

Everyone is on edge. Just drive on the highway for a few miles and you can see it plainly. Last night I just felt sad. It’s like tradition tells me I should be feeling all jolly and shit, but I just felt sad. It’s so wrong. I feel better today, but will that continue? Who knows. I ended up taking it out on my diet. I cheated like crazy yesterday. I’m not going to weigh in tomorrow because I don’t want any bad news to make me feel worse.

My plan for the weekend is to clean the whole house before we have guests over on Wednesday, wrap all of the presents that need wrapping, and pick up any straggler gifts. Really though, all I want to do is sleep. Maybe once that’s all finished I can have my usual post-prep burst of holiday cheer.

Maybe.

Originally published at robj2112.wordpress.com on December 19, 2014.

E-commerce is a thing. It has been for a while now. Like, for well over a year.

You may have noticed that the christmas season is upon us. It doesn’t matter if you celebrate it or not, you can’t avoid it. Few of us are lucky enough to not have to worry about going to work every day, and some of us (me, for instance) work far away from home and have very long commutes. Those of us who suffer from such a commute have a christmas shopping disadvantage in the by the time we get home and have some dinner it’s often too late to go out again. Much of our weekends are spent at the mall, but even so, there isn’t enough time to do all of the holiday prep work necessary.

That’s where e-commerce comes in. Do they still call it e-commerce?

I have done all of my christmas shopping online so far this year. Generally I suck I christmas shopping. I need to have gift ideas spelled out explicitly or I am going to get a whole pile of gifts that get returned for store credit. My wife is the biggest victim of my ineptness in that I buy more christmas gifts for her than for all other people combined. So I spend the whole christmas season hounding her for ideas. Once in a while though, throughout the year, she will mention something that I file away in my little pea brain for later gift giving use.

This happened once this year. Months ago she mentioned an idea for a hobby that she might want to try out and then never pursued it. When it came time to christmas shop I pulled that little nugget out of the depths of my otherwise empty head and bought it for her.

That’s not the e-commerce fail (I’m trying to set the world record for mentioning “e-commerce” in a blog post that no one will ever read). That happened earlier today.

People shop online. It happens all year, but during the holiday season it happens like crazy. Amazon.com does so much business that they are thinking of raising a fleet of drones that will initially deliver their packages before later developing into Skynet and exterminating humanity. In the meantime, UPS and FedEx and the United States Post Office (he said with a giggle) deliver packages seemingly around the clock. People in the US go to work in the morning and then come home in the evening to a front step loaded with packages.

I’m not the only guy here who’s aware of this, right? This is a well known thing.

Well it seems that the company I bought this one surprise gift for the Mrs from is not aware of this known thing. When I came home tonight there was a large box on the step. It contained this hobby item. I didn’t need to open the package to know this, because they shipped it in a box that not only had the name of the item in huge lettering printed on the box, it actually had a drawing of the item itself printed on the box.

Did I mention my wife got home about an hour before I did?

Did I mention that she literally had to walk over the package with all of that clear identifying printing?

Sonofabitch.

Thanks for blowing the surprise, you grinchy schmucks.

HoHoFreakin’Ho.