Decorating: check

The stockings have been hung by the chimney. With care, even! So I'm feeling (a little) better about this whole Christmas thing. On Saturday we acquired and decorated the tree and put Santa in his rightful place. On Sunday we dragged the whole fam damily to the mall for a gift shopping blitz and accomplished quite a bit.

Jo picked out a really elegant nightgown for my mom. She had her little change purse with her, containing her entire life savings, and wanted to buy the bright red socks that matched the night-shirt. "How do I make fifteen dollars?" she asked. "You'd need sixty quarters," I said. She consulted her purse. "How else do I make fifteen dollars?" I hated to break it to her: "Well ... you would have to have one hundred and fifty dimes." As her other grandma would say, the poor lamb. Fifteen dollars might as well have been a million. I offered to buy the socks and all was well.

...until we returned home that evening, and realized the little pink change purse was gone. Cue waterworks. We checked all our pockets and bags -- nothing. We distracted Jo, coaxed her and Opie into the bathtub and then into bed. But more than an hour and a half after she'd fallen asleep (when I was deep into my online shopping session, getting everything I hadn't picked up at the mall) she woke up and burst into tears, brokenhearted at her loss. I couldn't do anything to calm her and she eventually cried herself to sleep.

But! Happy ending! It only took two phone calls the next day to locate the precious purse, carefully stowed in a locked drawer at Williams-Sonoma. Jeff picked it up and couldn't resist buying this as well. So much for present overload.

Unrelated (well, draw your own conclusions): Care to comment?