I came up with this meme after a discussion at our book club’s holiday meeting last night. I am actually feeling less grinchy and less stressed out than I usually do during the holidays, but I thought it might be fun to hear what everyone has to say on the subject.

What is your least favorite holiday task? (e.g. shopping, cooking, wrapping)
My least favorite task is wrapping gifts. I can’t cut straight (I never have been able to cut straight; there is a long story about this involving my kindergarten teacher and my being left-handed but I’m not going to go into it). I can’t bring myself to care about how it’s all going to look, because someone is just going to rip up the paper and throw it away! Consequently, all of my gifts come out looking like they’ve been wrapped by a four-year-old. When I had a four-year-old, I could blame it on him/her “helping”– now my kids are 7 and 10, and I actually think they would do a better job than I do. In fact, wrapping presents may become their new holiday task.

What was the worst gift you ever received?
I actually can’t think of an answer for this one but I thought it would be fun to hear other people’s stories.

Who is the hardest person in your family to shop for?
Definitely my father-in-law. He has everything he needs. He doesn’t collect anything or have any really quirky hobbies. We can’t get him anything large or breakable because he’ll have to pack it in a suitcase and take it overseas. I pretty much rotate between buying him books, cd’s, and the occasional sailing doodad. This year he’s getting grilling tools.

What relative do you dread seeing at the holidays? Or, when you were a child, what relative did you dread seeing?
There’s no relative I dread seeing these days. I will admit that when I was really little, it creeped me out to have to go visit my great-grandmother and great-aunts in the nursing home during the holidays. They were so old, and I never knew what to say to them.  And then there were all of those other old people who would stop you in the hallways and sort of clutch at you.  I found it really scary.

What holiday tradition would you eliminate if you could?
Rolling out and decorating sugar cookies. Somehow I feel like I “should” do this, because the kids enjoy it, but I really really really hate rolling out cookies, trying to get the shapes to come out of the cookie cutter correctly, making the icing look nice. I hate it when Santa’s arm falls off or the reindeer loses an antler. It’s all too much for a recovering perfectionist to handle.

What do you swear, every holiday season, that you’ll never do again, only to find yourself doing it again the next year?
Every year, I am the “go-to” person for gift ideas for everyone else. I usually decide what the kids will get from us, Santa (shhhh!), my folks, and the in-laws; so, let’s see, that’s eight gift decisions. Then I decide what to get my folks, my in-laws, and my husband. That’s five more decisions. Then I select gifts for my husband’s two aunts, one uncle, four cousins, and two cousins’ kids. That’s nine additional decisions. Then my folks want to know what to get my in-laws and my husband, and the in-laws want to know what to get my folks. So that’s five more. Let’s see…that’s 27 gifts to select (if not actually, physically shop for, although I do that too for many of them!) Every year I say I’m not going to do this again, that at the very least I’m going to make YogaSpell get his own family’s gifts, but every year I somehow find myself sending emails, making extra trips to the mall, trying to figure out what an 80-year-old Spanish lady living in Venezuela would like for Christmas.

I would love to hear what the rest of you have to say about these topics!  Consider yourselves tagged!