etc.

All sorts of fortuitous coincidences and delightfully serendipitous events resulted in yesterday being the perfect pre-Christmas day. We started and finished our Christmas shopping in an hour, thanks to a fruitful brainstorming session in the car ride on the way to the mall, coupled with the luck of a fantastic parking spot and an alarming, but pleasing, dearth of parent-and-child shopping entourages. After the mall, we had a quiet dinner with Gayle and Dave and left with decorations, their three-foot tree, and our left-over wrapping paper and ribbons from last year. Once at home, I set up the tree and other festive bibelots, and set to work wrapping our small haul of Christmas presents, which, with a minor stroke of luck (and a lot of efficient use of paper), were all wrapped with said left-overs. And just as I was fastening the last ribbon to the last efficiently wrapped gift, I pulled the last of the tape out of the dispenser. To cap it all off, I woke up this morning, left the bedroom and entered the living room in trepidation, expecting to find the little tree on it’s side, ornaments scattered variously under various pieces of furniture, and all the ribbons playfully separated from their respective gifts thanks to noctural feline activity, only to find that the tree stood perkily where I left it, and all the presents in its diminutive shadow remained where I had thoughtfully arranged them in that thoughtfully haphazard way we arrange gifts under a tree.

A day of festive happenstance, if I ever saw one.