Christmas Gifts for a Four-Month Old

I just got done wrapping Anna's gifts. With her sitting next to me for most of it. It all seems a little futile - wrapping gifts I bought so I can unwrap them later. But it also felt wrong to not have gifts for her (me) to open tonight when we do our family Christmas. So I spent the last 20 minutes wrapping gifts that I will spend 20 minutes unwrapping in a few hours. At least I got to write "From: Mommy and Daddy" on them, which was fun. And actually I wrote "From: Momny and Daddy". Still not quite in the flow with all those bumpy letters. I kept coming up one bump short on the second "m".

Jamie and I discussed how we would do gifts for Anna several weeks ago. It's important to us to raise kids who understand material possessions are not so important and that Christmas is not just a fancy name for Give-Me-Stuff Day. It seemed a little hypocritical to say, "Christmas is about Jesus. Now here's your ridiculously huge pile of presents, most of which you don't need and will only play with for a day or two." So we decided we'd do three gifts: something she could play with, something we wanted her to have and an outfit. We're also giving her a Christmas book and hope in the future to make a new Christmas book or movie a shared gift between the many members of our clan of mini-Hotalens.

Of course, a few days after we came up with this plan all on our own, I read on someone else's blog this little ditty: "Something you want, something you need, something to wear and something to read." I've now seen that on approximately 39,000 different websites. Blogs, articles, Facebook posts. It's everywhere. Not only are we completely unoriginal with our gift giving plan, but we didn't even make it rhyme. I feel so dull and uncreative.

Maybe when she's older and figures out we're not the only ones who follow that gift giving recipe, I can convince Anna I started it.