It has been a long week with a lot of unexpected occurrences. I’ve witnessed, almost firsthand, near tragic highway spinouts and big rig collisions. I’ve also bought a new minivan, but that’s another story. Surprisingly, in spite of all the action, I am pretty much ready for Christmas here on its eve. This is due in no small part to my wife’s thoughtful planning over the past six to eight weeks. I am hoping that my readiness for tomorrow somehow makes up for the fact that in spite of her careful planning, I managed to botch the delivery of several gifts to our neighbors.
For what it is worth, we live in a great little neighborhood where we have an occasional summer block party as well as exchange gifts over the Holidays. At this level, things are pretty benign and usually create a friendly environment year round, but perhaps I have jeopardized the peaceful arrangement this time. Perhaps, I’ve given that last bit of evidence my neighbors needed to seal their verdict: sometimes he just doesn’t seem all there.
I apparently wasn’t listening carefully or I didn’t really believe that I’d be the one directly exchanging gifts with the neighbors, especially unsupervised, when my wife gave me the rundown as to which package went with what food gift. So, when the neighbors arrived with their presents, in my haste to save time and give them their gifts from us on the spot, I skipped a few critical steps. My desire for efficiency clouded over the need for accuracy, even in this seemingly easy exchange. My wife wasn’t able to get everyone the identical gifts, so she compromised with nice yet different ones. At some point though, I got it in my head that certain colored gifts should get ice cream (I think they were bowls) and others were supposed to get hot cocoa (coffee mugs), which I incidentally forgot to pickup from the store. Anyway, when the time for exchanging gifts arrived, I winged it and just gave nearly all of them ice cream. This isn’t so bad up to this point. Our freezer was packed with ice cream, about six half gallons, which is a lot - even for our household. I assumed that nearly all of them were for gifts, but in seizing the opportunity to make some room in our freezer and save time, I gave most of the neighbors nearly full half gallon containers of ice cream.
Instead of opening up every container in their presence to check if it was a fresh, untouched carton of ice cream, I assumed a confident approach and felt the carton’s weight, observed the packaging and went from there. Well, my confident, can-do attitude has my wife making the rounds on Christmas eve asking each neighbor if she can inspect their gifted ice cream to see if they got a fresh and full carton of ice cream from her usually-competent-in-these-matters-husband.
Perhaps the neighbors haven’t dipped into their gifts yet, but then again we already did and enjoyed their ice cream so much that we decided to share it. Maybe, they’ll see it as a great assurance of quality that gifts from our house have a taste-tested seal of approval right before delivery. Maybe, I’ll just lie low for awhile and hope that this snafu blows over, but my guess is that I have made my neighbors’ Christmas richer, not creamier, by providing them with a story that they’ll never forget and never forget to pass on to their children, and their children’s children: the year their neighbor was so desperate to return one gift with another that he went to the freezer and gave them the first thing he saw, a partially consumed carton of ice cream. I sure wish I had an alibi…but I don’t.
Hopefully, our neighbors and my wife are getting a great big Christmas laugh over this because I am either too ashamed or too teary eyed from laughing that I can’t show myself in good company at the moment...Just for the record, I meant no harm. I wish them all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year nearly full of everything good, true, and beautiful.
