Why did I wait so long?

I have tons of knitting to do. Due mostly to poor planning on my part, I have not been sitting around enjoying the season after having already done all of my Christmas shopping and such before Thanksgiving. No. For some reason I put a lot of it off, like the fact that I didn't know if my family was going to draw names or what. We have decided on the Chinese gift exchange instead.

I don't know if I like the idea of the Chinese gift exchange. We do that at the club, and that is fun to watch. Everyone puts in something in the ten to twenty dollar range, and then everyone draws a number. Whoever got number one unwraps a gift. The person with the next number can either take that gift or unwrap another gift. People with higher numbers can steal any gift that they want from people with lower numbers, who then go and unwrap another gift. If you are the last person, you can either unwrap the last gift or steal anything from anyone else.

So that's a fun thing to watch, if it's a large group. And I've only spent ten dollars or so on what I put into it, usually Bath & Body Works stuff that was on sale, or maybe a book I found on sale and a gift certificate to buy another book. I figure that if my gift doesn't go to someone who likes that sort of thing, it's no big deal, they can easily re-gift it.

But I'm not so sure that I like the idea in the smaller group. I'm not sure that I like the idea that no one is buying anything especially for me, and the stuff that I'm buying isn't especially for a particular person either. And it's more than ten dollars. I had heard that it was going to be forty dollars, and when I heard it was the Chinese gift exchange I asked if we could drop that down to thirty dollars. And the way that things are now, no one really had a problem lowering the amount.

I'm still having a bit of a problem with it. Last year and the year before, (when we didn't have this idea of drawing names or having the Chinese gift exchange) I wasn't sure what to get people, except one person really seemed to like Bath & Body Works stuff, and a couple of other people seemed to like it too, though maybe not quite as much as the first. So I bought a lot of that stuff throughout the year when it was on sale, so by the time Christmas came I had lots of it to make gift baskets with. There's only one person who just really doesn't care for that stuff at all. So I bought some more of this stuff this year, just not as much as last year, hoping that I would draw the name of the person who really likes the stuff, or maybe one of the others.

But now we didn't draw names, and I don't have a lot of money to go out and buy something else. I have to put in two gifts, one for myself and one for my husband. So I figure one will still be the Bath & Body Works stuff, and the other will be a scarf that I've been working on. I have no idea if anyone will like the scarf other than my husband. So I've hid the scarf from him and hope that he's the one who ends up with it. I don't know, the others might really like it if they saw it. Anyway, if the one person ends up with Bath & Body Works stuff, great, and if her husband ends up with it he will just give most of it to her. Another person might want it, or I might end up taking it home with us. So that only leaves the one person who would really not like getting Bath & Body Works stuff, and I thought that I'd put some books and DVDs in the car and maybe offer to trade something.

Anyway, the scarf is mostly finished, but it still needs some more work. It has to be finished before Christmas Eve, and I'm trying to work in it when my husband won't see it. The other knitting has to be finished sooner, in only a week. One piece is done except for the fringe, and another piece is almost half done.

I really should have done this stuff sooner.

And then I have one major present to buy, which I still don't have a clue about, and three minor ones that aren't really a problem. Mostly more Chinese gift exchange stuff, but that's all in the five to ten dollar range and is stuff like Bath & Body Works stuff, candles, candy, etc....