We could keep it a secret.

Anakin:  ”It doesn’t have to be that way. We could keep it a secret.”
Padme:  ”We’d be living a lie. One we couldn’t keep, even if we wanted to.”
              Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones

Keeping gifts a secret, come Christmas time, is so hard for me – the main gift buyer. It just makes me want to dance around screaming, “I’ve got the coolest stuff in the closet right now. Do you want to see? Do you want to see?”

Luckily, I got to give my guys (and myself) part of our Christmas presents early this year. A couple of years ago, we all bought cheap little mp3 players for next to nothing at an after-Christmas sale and they’ve served us well – until this fall – when all three started to die off on us. Padawan Learner couldn’t get sound from the headphones on both sides anymore. Dad Windu’s kept depleting the battery halfway through his run, despite putting in a freshly charged one before heading out. And mine? Well, let’s just say that it and I were often in disagreement about which songs I had downloaded onto it. 

Because of this, Dad Windu has been Jones-ing for an iPod Nano (after playing with our Sunday Morning Doughnut Buddy’s) for a couple of months and, since he rarely asks for anything, I was determined to get him one this year. I looked over the models available, and picked the 3rd generation with video with 8G of memory instead of the newest version because of some complaints I’d read about by other runners regarding the “shake to shuffle” feature when used for running. 

Padawan Learner and I began to plot about how to get one without DW knowing about it. We concocted a master scheme to convince DW that we were getting a new tent and camping equipment. I filled up my cart on Amazon with camping equipment so it kept showing camping stuff across the “Recommended for you” header on the main page. I “hid” camping equipment catalogs in the house with dog-eared pages. Friends made comments about “Hey, I have a coupon for free shipping for ‘that stuff from that place.’ Let me know if you want to use it.” I even got a big @ss box to wrap up under the tree. I am soooo good.

Too good, apparently, because I completely snowed him into thinking he was getting a tent and he called to tell me that he found a really good price on the Nano. A round-robin of me saying, “Don’t buy it,” and him saying, “Why? It’s $10 cheaper here than anywhere else,” began. Finally, I had to give and snarled said, “Christmas, you idiot!” He quietly said, “Oh. OK.”

The nice thing is that along the way PW and I also began Jones-ing for an iPod Nano, so I ordered one for him and one me for Christmas too. I pooled my pennies, snagged some coin from a few other places, and basically scrimped and saved to be able to give us a ‘Holly, Jolly, Apple-based Christmas’. I filled them up and gave them out on the morning of the bus trip so that my reading-in-the-car-makes-me-want-to-hurl men would have something to do on the 3 hour one-way (that became 4.5 hours one-way) bus trip last weekend. 

But fear not, I did get a few other little things to hand out on Christmas morning, too, and they’re in the closet right now. Do you want to see? Do you want to see?

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