My Autism Insights

Manic Monday prompt by Mo!

This is my least favorite time of year for so many reasons, but shopping is right up there on my personal Seven Levels of Hell list.  That’s probably why I do most of my holiday shopping in September and October.  Today is supposed to be Cyber-Monday, the Internet equivalent to Black Friday, I suppose, but I did my online shopping yesterday.  Thank you, Barnes & Nobel for your coupon deadlines!

Gus will be getting (courtesy of his grandparents) the Scholastic Children’s Encyclopedia and a boxed set of Encyclopedia Brown novels.   What could be a better gift for a kid who wakes up asking about things like the 4th dimension and time travel?  When it gets closer to the date, I’m also going to download Encarta 2009 for him, particularly cool because we get to avoid the packaging for this gift!  Go green gifts!

Our purchases for Gus have included: a few Pokemon themed gifts, my old MP3 player loaded with his favorite music (because we recycle) and assorted books for the stocking.  There may be a DVD in the works, if so, it will be High School Musical 3 and will probably be an impulse buy from Walmart while food shopping.  This may seem like a scanty list, but our goals this year were to give the kids more meaningful gifts that they will actually play with (as opposed to just stuff that will sit around cluttering up our already cluttered space) and also to make sure they enjoyed their holiday without being too materialistic.  We want to make sure it’s not all about a gazillion presents under the tree.  MM already gets as much pleasure from giving gifts as she does getting them.  They both love doing holiday baking and delivering dishes of cookies to their friends.  There are other traditions we have that are always much more memorable than what they opened from under the tree. Hopefully, we’re doing a decent job of instilling the deeper significance of the holiday season.

After all, you can’t shop for memories.

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