My school district closes for the entire week of Thanksgiving.  Cody and Carter’s school, however, is open Monday and Tuesday.  This means that I had two days off with no kids around the house.  Very nice.

I did the typical things – laundry, lesson planning, lunch out with Husband (hooray!) – and some atypical things – reading in the sunny backyard, locating and lugging out of our storage unit all our Christmas things I so missed last year when we lived in the apartment.

Feeling a bit Christmassy and with half a day of alone time on my hands, I decided to go stocking stuffer shopping.  I love stocking stuffers.  They are by far my favorite thing about Christmas.  I like buying them, I like wrapping them, I like putting them in the stockings, and I love watching people reach into an almost magical never-ending depth of a soft red stocking to pull out the little wrapped gifts.

Stockings are a perfect end to the traditions of our family Christmas (we are the people who open gifts on Christmas Eve.  On Christmas Morning there are one or two gifts from Santa and the stockings, also from the jolly rotund fellow.)  The morning is mellow, the large, loudly colored and beeping toys have all been opened the night before.  The small gifts found in the stockings are simple, useful, or tasty snacks.  They are the surprising little twinkling bursts of purple, red, or blue after a large and loud firework.

It is the day before Thanksgiving and the stocking stuffers have been purchased and sorted.  Never have I been one to be ahead of the game when it comes to Christmas.  So yeah, I am feeling a big smug.

In an effort to deflect any interest the boys may have if they were to look up at the top shelf in our closet, I have labeled them according to size instead of using names. Carter is big, Cody is bigger, and Husband is biggest.