{"id":2397,"date":"2010-12-23T20:27:07","date_gmt":"2010-12-24T01:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/?p=2397"},"modified":"2010-12-23T20:27:07","modified_gmt":"2010-12-24T01:27:07","slug":"elfing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/elfing\/","title":{"rendered":"Elfing."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Pro Tip<\/strong>: When someone asks you about where they might procure a difficult to find Christmas present, the correct answer is &#8220;[Store1], [store2] or [store3].&#8221; The correct answer is <em>not<\/em>, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ll pick one up for you.&#8221; Especially when you&#8217;re already done with your own Christmas shopping.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pro Tip<\/strong>: I am an idiot.<\/p>\n<p>It took half my day just to <em>get<\/em> to the mall today. And then, when I finally arrived there, I was so tired of sitting in traffic, I felt to compelled to buy more than just that one Christmas present. This is how we&#8217;re going to find our way into economic recovery, people. Angry shopping. It&#8217;s the American way.<\/p>\n<p>In better news, my new Chuck Taylors are <em>adorable<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>In even better news, shopping burns a ton of calories. You know, with all of the walking and the holding of heavy presents and the dodging of mall security zooming around on their Segways. Which means that I very well might have offset a good 17% of the Christmas cookie calories that I consumed today. We just won&#8217;t talk about the entire bag of Clementines that arrived at our house last night and is now empty. Kristian didn&#8217;t eat any and the dog doesn&#8217;t like citrus.<\/p>\n<p>If you are what you eat, I&#8217;m staying away from <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oh_My_Darling,_Clementine\">foaming brines<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>(Somebody, please tell me that you got that joke).<\/p>\n<p>In the best of news, not one creature has thrown up all over my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/?p=2390\">nice, clean house<\/a>. I&#8217;m tempted to make a bulimia joke, but that would just be in poor taste.<\/p>\n<p>(Get it? Taste?).<\/p>\n<p>(I have none).<\/p>\n<p>I have one handcrafted gift to finish, one guest room to tidy up, one table to pick up from my Mom&#8217;s house and a couple of presents to wrap. And then? I&#8217;m going to declare myself to be officially ready for Christmas. Which means that it will be time for Kristian&#8217;s Mom to get me all drunk on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mulled_wine\">gl\u00f6gg<\/a>. She makes it with vodka and it comes in these little, tiny glasses and she&#8217;s always so <em>insistent<\/em> that you have another one. Last year I was a good little guest and accepted all gl\u00f6gg that was offered to me. Which is why Kristian had to make a plate for me when everyone else went up to the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sm\u00f6rg\u00e5sbord\">sm\u00f6rg\u00e5sbord<\/a>. Me? I stayed sitting on the couch, pretending to be completely sober. I think that I was at least partially successful. I&#8217;m invited back, after all.<\/p>\n<p>I do plan to spend the rest of this evening watching Law and Order streamed from Netflix. It&#8217;s just my way of pretending that my sister, Allison, is here to celebrate with us.<\/p>\n<p>(Shaking my fist at the airlines and the high cost of plane tickets from California to Boston).<\/p>\n<p>If I&#8217;m too busy\/tired\/drunk to post before then, I hope that you all have wonderful Christmases. For those of you who don&#8217;t celebrate Christmas, I hope that you enjoy your Chinese Food and that the wait is not too long.<\/p>\n<p>Happy Holidays!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a title=\"Merry Christmas! by hopers, on Flickr\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/hopers\/4214744216\/\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2570\/4214744216_ac8a7f9815.jpg?resize=333%2C500\" alt=\"Merry Christmas!\" width=\"333\" height=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pro Tip: When someone asks you about where they might procure a difficult to find Christmas present, the correct answer is &#8220;[Store1], [store2] or [store3].&#8221; The correct answer is not,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[41,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holidays","category-random"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5yggS-elfing","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2397"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2404,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397\/revisions\/2404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}