Holiday Loot 2016

Happy Holidays! I hope everyone had time to reflect on friends, family, and the meaning of Christmas. And now that we're done with that, on to the loot!

My parents kindly sent me a cash gift that I could use to obtain a new tablet, since mine died a few months back. I did a brief poll of some friends and decided on an ASUS ZenPad 10. It's not the most powerful or feature-rich tablet, but all I really want is a good-sized quality display suitable for reading comics and playing simple mobile games (i.e. Star Realms). This tablet fills that need admirably, at a reasonable price.

From my brother, a fine paper book! Literally and in terms of subject matter. Most of what I've been reading recently has been in eBook format, so this will be a nice change of pace back to basics. And it goes nicely with The History of Writing series from Extra History, which I just finished watching the other day.

I also participated in a Secret Santa gift exchange this year with some folks from the QT3 forums. For my part, I shipped gifts all the way to Norway. The distance meant it was a good idea to keep it small, so the only physical item was a small model Viper ship from Battlestar Galactica - my giftee is a fan of the forum game based on that show. I also added some Kindle books (no shipping costs there): a cookbook full of video-game-related recipes and a couple of sci-fi novels.

From my secret santa came some reading and listening material, along with notes mentioning that some of the posts on this very blog helped with ideas. Star Trek - Ships of the Line is a 350-page book of artwork featuring all sorts of ships from the Star Trek universe (gift idea inspired by this post). The Amory Wars is an epic sci-fi comic collection, which I'd never heard of but looks very interesting. Even better, it comes with an accompanying metal album of songs related to the story! Coheed and Cambria frontman Claudio Sanchez is also the writer of the comics. Looking forward to checking out the set. (Update: There was also Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer book! It came a couple of days later in a separate box.)

Hope everyone out there had a Christmas as enjoyable as mine - happy holidays!

Gift Wrapping

I'm horrible at wrapping gifts...mine will be the one that looks like the paper was wadded up and taped at random. Don't bother trying to save that wrapping paper! It's still an interesting tradition, though.

Marketplace had a story the other day about the gift wrapping industry, which accounts for over $3 billion a year in retail sales. That seems incredibly high to me, but I guess when pretty much everyone buys your product each year, it's not hard to end up with that kind of money.

I hadn't realized that the idea of decorative wrapping was only about a hundred years old until I heard that Marketplace story, and read this article. Oh, there had been plenty of wrapping before that, largely to protect the gift until it could be delivered. Japan has a tradition of using wrapping cloths, or furoshiki. China may have been the first culture to wrap gifts in paper, way back in the Song dynasty. But those were primarily functional, not decorative.

Furoshiki

In 1917, the Hall brothers ran out of the usual wrapping paper in their Hallmark store in Kansas City. They looked around at what they had in the storeroom, and decided they'd try selling some "fancy French paper" instead. That worked incredibly well, and within a few years Hallmark was making decorative wrapping paper themselves. Now gift wrapping is a massive industry.

So don't feel bad about ripping the paper off those gifts this year. (Do recycle it, though.) It might be inefficient, but it's good for the retail industry.

Done Shopping

My Christmas shopping is done. It was really done back before Thanksgiving, but it turned out the wrapping paper left over from last year was insufficient, so I had to make another store trip.

I will now pause while everyone still trying to decide what to buy hates me.

Boxes ready for mailing.

Getting done with shopping early is pretty essential in my case, actually. There's a lot of distance between me and my various gift recipients. 1100 miles is the shortest travel distance. I do use the Internet to send things electronically, of course, especially for the international family members. But I don't like doing that all the time.

My list is pretty short, basically just close family. My circle of friends tends to be of the "let's just go out and buy each another a beer" persuasion over actually exchanging gifts. So that helps when finishing off the gift-buying list.

What really makes it possible to be done with holiday gifts early, though, is shopping all year long. Everyone has those moments when you see something in a store, or run across something online, and think "<insert person here> would really like that." I've learned to take advantage of those moments as they happen. I write down the idea, and pick things up off the list as they're on sale or otherwise easily available.

So once this holiday season is over, don't put down the gift-giving lists. Keep it handy for next year, as and when the ideas are right in front of you.