I actually enjoyed my holiday shopping this year.

It was all done online, without setting foot in a store, and I didn’t have a single stressful encounter in a mall parking lot or in line at a store. Amazon.com, the Criterion Collection website, Etsy, Netflix and few others deserve credit for helping with this endeavor.

I spent lots of time on Etsy, browsing through various hand-made, boutique-shop-like, cool things. Jewelry, clothing, art (prints, paintings and sculpture), wine racks, bags, wallets, truffles, and just all manner of interesting and creatively inspiring goodies. I found several items that fit the bill for a particular person I was shopping for - and I think that this person will love them. Or at least really enjoy them.

It’s not mass-produced crap. The recipient of such a gift is not going to run into 10 other people on the street wearing the same earrings/shirt, carrying the same bag/wallet, or owning the same print (unlike the millions of people who have Klimt’s “The Kiss” hanging somewhere).

Could I have spent far more money than I did?

Yea, verily, yea.

Could I have spent a ridiculous amount of money on myself?

Hells yes. But I refrained.

I strongly recommend taking a look at Etsy or Shana Logic when you have your next birthday/holiday/gift-purchasing occasion.

Now it’s time to start wrapping gifts. I really enjoy doing it but I get a *little* crazy there. Take one (1) type A perfectionist with a mild obsessive compulsive disorder and major clinical depression. Give her some neat square and rectangular objects t0 wrap, as well as some oddly shaped ones and see how she deals with the self-imposed burden of wrapping everything as perfectly as the square objects.

It’s almost as entertaining as watching me compulsively straighten silverware at a restaurant or diner so the pieces are parallel to one another and in the center of the napkin. Or as entertaining as my (charmingly?) strange desire to have even numbers of tracks on a mix CD - and for all the DVDs in their clamshell cases to be straight, titles reading along a straight horizontal line, not rotated. It plays into control issues… there are OCD moments of scrapping paper and starting over if the patterns in the design aren’t lining up with one another after being wrapped around the item, and if it’s not done just so… well, it really feels like the end of the world and means that I am a useless waste who can’t do anything right and will be forever shunned by everyone around her. Because the wrapping job wasn’t perfect.

I’m learning to let go and laugh at myself. Really.

So here’s the dilemma: I’m not a religious person, but the holiday season is pretty secularized at this point, so it has become a time to wish your friends and co-workers good things for the new year (and not related to the birthday of baby Jesus), as well as a time to drop a line to people you think about but don’t get to see very often (or at all) and let them know you still care (or make them feel guilty or make yourself feel like a better person in fractured cases).

It’s difficult to find cards that convey the care without much of the holiday message. You’re usually stuck with ridiculously gimmicky cards (like the Festivus card I found yesterday) or something so generic, it’s devoid of personality. I managed to find two cards that did the trick for me:

The first I found at Barnes and Noble; the second at Target. The second is a bit harder to read, but it simply says, “snow is glistening.” I dig the rounded corners.

Now all I have to do is draw up my list and see if I have addresses for the peeps on the list. This strikes me as a perfect Sunday afternoon project.