The Christmas Rush

For me, the Christmas rush started even before Thanksgiving: My clients have really ramped-up their need for reports, for some reason. I would have thought that with the economic climate, the first thing to go for mail-order businesses would have been The Consultant, but it seems not, at least for an appreciable number of them. I've been busy writing reports that analyze trends from past years and incorporate 2008 numbers so that my clients can try to predict what is going to happen this year. I've also been writing reports that extract exactly which customers are likely to purchase certain types of products in the November-December time frame, so my clients can suck them out of their systems and email the heck out of them with promotions. Sorry if you're on the receiving end of that.

Anyway, between Thanksgiving guests, six Nutcracker performances to which Madison had to be ferried on the three days after Thanksgiving (the Bach Children's Chorus sings the Waltz of the Snowflakes at the end of the first act...this is the performance with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and the Rochester City Ballet), cooking down the turkey bones into stock, and writing client reports, it has been a busy week.

I suppose that to a small extent my clients' anxiety has infected me. I started being anxious even before Thanksgiving that I hadn't really started my Christmas shopping yet, even though I actually had ordered some beautiful books from First Folio Society. Madison has also talking about a remote-control spy plane that she saw in a Discovery Channel Store catalog in October. The plane had a little camera that allowed you to take photos from 500 feet in the air. Now, you and I can imagine how crappy these photos are likely to be, but you can't exactly say that to a nine-year-old with stars in her eyes and an imagination on fire.

I kind of hoped she'd forget about the plane, given that it is pretty expensive. Nope. She's talked about it for the past month. So I sighed on Sunday and went to buy it. Small snag: out of stock. I then looked at some reviews of the particular plane and was not encouraged by what I saw. But I did some more online work and found a comparably-priced plane with a camera (I only found 2 or 3 on the market that had cameras) that got better reviews. I found it for a reasonable price on eBay from a Toronto seller. So, fingers crossed.

The Folio Society is in Great Britain, and the books I'd ordered only last week came yesterday. I thought sure they'd have a U.S. distribution center, but they arrived yesterday all marked Air Mail. The cardboard box came in a nice fastened burlap sack so that no one could tell what they are. Unfortunately, I didn't think, and I opened the burlap sack practically in the girls' presence, and there, stamped in big letters on the side of the shipping box, was Harry Potter Boxed Set. Sigh. One surprise down the drain. That's okay, she's excited. And she doesn't know about the treasure chest.

But the best present so far is the dollhouse. My girls have wanted an elegant dollhouse for a while, I think mostly due to my telling them about the house I had when I was a kid, so I thought it was time to do it before they got too old. (Is this house as much for me as for them? Yes. Hush.) I was investigating prices this weekend. Geez Louise! Sellers want over $1000 even for a KIT! It made me think I'm in the wrong industry, that I should go out and get me some boards and a jig saw and start my own business. So, off to Craigslist I went. Saturday night, I found an amazing one. I emailed the folks immediately; turns out they are an elderly couple who live near where the girls have gymnastics. I snuck over to their house last night when the girls had their class. The husband made it for the wife in the 1970s some time after they married, and they spent 10 years building and decorating and wiring it with actual lights. It's a lot sturdier than the flimsy dollhouses that you can buy as a kit to build, and they sold it to me for less than 1/10 the cost of a new dollhouse. I felt a little guilty, like I should tell these nice people that they were selling it for too little (especially since the wife just had a liver transplant), but instead I showed them photos of the girls and talked about how long they would use it, and how the girls' children will use it too. They liked that. David is going to pick it up tonight while I have the girls at choir rehearsal. It is going to be great under the tree. Or, rather, overshadowing the tree. It's that big.