Thanksgiving is this week, and that sentence alone freaks me out just a little bit.  I mean, where did 2009 go?

Thanksgiving makes people think of a lot of things.  Family, traditions, FOOD.  (When else are you allowed to eat marshmallows on your vegetables without people judging you?)

It can also mean Stress with a capital S (sometimes for the very same reasons: family, traditions, food).

It also marks that time of year that we cannot continue to deny one simple fact - and I apologize to any of you who are trying your best to deny this fact for as long as possible.  When Thanksgiving is over, we cannot be angry that the neighbors have little twinkling lights all over their house.  We cannot groan when we walk into the mall and there are giant ornaments hanging everywhere.  We cannot be annoyed that the grocery store is playing THOSE SONGS over and over (and over) again.  (Well… in theory.)

It’s time for those next holidays.  The ones that involve singing and cheer and gifts.

So now is the time to start planning.  Why not take the first step and post those books, toys, and clothes that you’ve been meaning to put on Zwaggle?  Not only will you have a chance to increase the amount of Zoints in your account to use for your own holiday shopping, but you’ll be giving other families the opportunity to give those items to someone they love.

And that can help with the whole Stress thing.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

I’ll just come right out and say it: I hate my husband’s birthday. Perhaps this makes me a bad person, or just someone who doesn’t get it, but after eight years of marriage, I had yet to give him a gift that didn’t put a look of utter disappointment or boredom on his face.  During the early years of our relationship I ran to his side, for fear that he just happened to enter a coma the second he opened whatever trinket I’d presented. “Are you OK?” I would say, trying to revive his interest. He looked like he’d just bathed in Botox.

Years passed, arguments on the matter were won and lost, and finally we agreed: For the man who had everything and needed nothing, we could skip the gift tradition.  Until our ninth year of marriage, during which I found something so unique, so him, that I foolishly broke  our cease fire to bear the treasure I believed made the perfect gift. I gave my betrothed the horrible thing I’d heard him pining for during bouts of nostalgic gum-flapping with his high school friends.  I gave him a racing ski sweater from the ’80s, the red-white-and-blue kind with the padded elbows for slapping the slalom gates with your forearms and the awkwardly sleek “Euro” fit, for apres ski with the Swedish Bikini Team and Spuds Mackenzie.  He loved the gift so much that he went on a retro ski sweater buying spree, a bender that resulted in a closet orgy of fabrics that said, “wake-me-up-before-you-go-go.” After a summer of combing vintage stores, he likes to spend the winter strutting  around the house asking how he looks. “Like a young David Hasselhoff staring in a Mentos commercial,”  I like to say, which he assumes is a compliment.

With the odd, surprising, and much-celebrated acquisition of the late President Gerald Ford’s ski sweater at an auction in Beaver Creek, CO last year, I vowed to continue with our agreement to simply wish my husband a happy birthday.  And then this year, I did it again: I found what potentially possesses the means to my undoing, and I found it on Zwaggle: a Foosball table.

So that I could surprise him, I arranged for two of Alex’s friends to help me pick up and move the thing from Denver to Boulder.  After meeting the kind Zwaggler who arranged to be home for the pickup, I could see our friend Jeff was confused.  How much did I  pay for it? Where did I find out about such a treasure? What happens if we find out later it’s broken, or something’s missing? He didn’t see me hand over any cash. “You didn’t use PayPal, in advance did you?” he asked.  “I paid with Zoints,” I explained, and then explained again to Alex after we surprised him in the basement with it later that day.  “Look how smart you are!” they exclaimed, “How clever! What a great concept!”

It was the first time the men in my life began to understand the power of  Zwaggle, and it was blowing their Foosball-loving minds. Just as an aside, and to take a page out of the Dooce playbook, I think it’s worth mentioning that, even after the time I’ve spent speaking the Zwaggle gospel to everyone I know, the only thing Alex knew  about Zwaggle before the day the foosball table arrived was that, “I like the way your boobs look in your Zwaggle tee shirt.”

“Uh, thanks,” I say, only taking partial credit for the compliment. Although American Apparel has the word “American” in it, it has no idea how American women are built.  Some people make modest fitness goals for themselves that include running farther each day, or finishing a triathlon. Mine is to someday comfortably fit into an American Apparel size XXL after I’ve washed it.

Anyway, with the Foosball table in the house, and Alex making frightening plans to set it up outside, along with a slip ‘n slide and daiquiri machine, Jeff uttered a phrase that may have chilled my blood, had I not been thinking ahead. He said, “I thought you didn’t want us hanging around your house all night.”

Take another look at the photo. Notice anything missing? Stroke of genius number 2: Hide the little spinning men until you’re ready to host a bunch of hooligans from the tri-state area.

Until next year, life is good.  And who knows? Maybe I’ll find something even better next year. But if I don’t, I can always use my fallback plan of sticking to the no-gift agreement. Or if there’s ever a relapse of sweater-shopping, I’ll be able to make Alex a page-a-day calendar featuring a photo of a different sweater for every day of the year. I’ll title it “Three Hundred Sixty Five Days of Rad.”  I’ll make extras put them up on Zwaggle, because you know you’ll want one, either for yourself, or for your spouse’s next birthday.

My niece had her first baby this past week.  It’s been an exciting, happy time for the entire family.  It’s so fun to see a young girl, one that I’ve known since she was teeny tiny, now firmly in love with her own little bundle.  I’d also forgotten, now that I’m in the midst of preschool/elementary/middle/high school, how small they once were.  And how fast they grow.  It doesn’t seem possible that the kid who went to court to get his driver’s license yesterday is the same one who once wore newborn sizes and couldn’t keep socks on his little feet.

Sorry.  I got a little verklempt there.

I had an actual physical reaction, though, to seeing all of the baby STUFF that she has.  Honest to goodness, it hurt.  Swings, bouncers, high chairs, diaper bags, and a portacrib, not to mention the rattles and sippy cups, the Bumbo seat and the car seat and yadda yadda yadda.  How much STUFF does one baby really need?  I know I used substantially less with each child, until we were at the bare minimum of what was truly essential to us.  Onesies, socks, soft leather shoes and a sling.  Clearly we were more sparse than most people. But we also had a lot of kids to help figure it out.

And what I keep thinking about is how much all of this stuff costs, and what a short window of time it is in use, and where it goes when that little baby has outgrown it.  Everything in my house has been pretty much used and abused to death, but not all families are as large as mine.  Not to mention, everyone always has one thing, one toy, one gadget or gizmo that was seemed essential to purchase at the time but just didn’t work out. Like the, um, baby food feeder - that mesh sack created to hold food that a baby isn’t ready to eat by himself.  Yes, I really did have one of those.

List those things here.  The items you didn’t need, the products you didn’t want, the essentials that weren’t so essential after all or the ones that just aren’t being used anymore.  Take the Zoints that you earn and use them for something you do need OR donate them to a charity in your community.  There are more than 25 charities listed now all across the country.  Help a family in need acquire the very basics that may be beyond their reach.  It’s a great way to give and receive since you’ll also get a tax write for those items.

Once you’ve decided what the essentials are for your family, I really wanna know - what did you find completely frivolous?  Share your stories with us.  Do you have a mesh food feeder in the dark reaches of your closet too?