All we need is a tree

In previous years, my goal has been to finish all of our Christmas shopping by Thanksgiving. It's an aggressive goal, but we've come pretty close the last couple of years, and our vacation and shopping in France helped significantly last year.

This year, we planned 2 European vacations during the latter part of the year. We finished about 2/3 of our Christmas shopping in Italy et al, but our upcoming trip to Germany is over a month away, so there's no way that we'll be able to finish all of our Christmas shopping by Thanksgiving.

But that's ok. We'll be in Germany and Austria for nearly a week, and a week that is entirely dedicated to shopping should give us plenty of time to finish.

Let me rephrase, in the likely event that B reads this posting. The week will, of course, not be devoted entirely to shopping. There will be historical walking tours and museum visits and all of that. But Munich itself has something like 12 different Christmas markets (with one devoted entirely to nativity scenes--amazing), and we're visiting several other cities to tour their markets as well (and, of course, their historical sites...).

So we won't be finished with all of our shopping until mid-December at the earliest, but today while waiting for the chimney inspector to arrive, we finished wrapping all of the gifts that we have bought. And now all we need is a tree...

Early November is probably too early to buy a Christmas tree, especially since we'll be out of the country for a week in early December. I suppose I'll have to make due with Christmas CDs in the stereo for now.