1/15/2016

saturday december 26

today i celebrated christmas with my family, eating plenty of food and opening all the gifts we’d exchanged. during our gift-opening session, i picked up one addressed to me from my parents and opened it up. it was a box filled with those little things of stylistically-shredded paper for packing purposes, but when i reached down through that paper to the bottom of the box, there was nothing there.

"keep looking," my mom said, and for about 20 seconds, i frantically tried to sort through all those tiny papers to find the gift. having still not found anything, i looked back to my mom in confusion, at which point she had a realization — this was a box with nothing in it that she’d wrapped for decorative purposes and then mistakenly labeled as one of my gifts. while she was pretty embarrassed about this and felt bad about it, everyone else - including me - agreed that it was a pretty hilarious prank and she really got me good.

1 comment:

JDK said...

Ever since I was about 8, my mom has used a code for the presents for myself and my sister so we wouldn't try to suss out what gifts were what. For example, the gift tag would say something like "From: Barack, To: Michelle" or the like. My mom is notoriously-bad at forgetting what gifts are what, which means that every Christmas, without fail, I end up opening a present intended for my sister. I think that sensation of expectation -> total disappointment is the least favorite thing on my calendar on any given year. Opening a present not intended for you is like answer the door and expecting the pizza guy but finding Mormons there instead. (Not sure about the Mormon population of Canadia.)