No snooping at Christmas time!

We have a tradition each year of purchasing a few ornaments for the Christmas tree that are symbolic for the year. For example, the year Doug ran his first marathon we purchased an ornament with 26.2 on it (that’s the distance of a marathon). This year we hung an ornament we purchased on our trip to Hawaii with Santa doing the hula.

Last January we went to Disney World, and while there we purchased several Christmas ornaments. When we arrived home we put the ornaments in a safe place where the dogs wouldn’t get them. Unfortunately, the place was a bit too safe as we couldn’t remember where we put them. For the last week I have spent some time each day searching for the box that the ornaments were in. I knew they had to be around here, but I just couldn’t find them.

Yesterday I was looking yet again in our bedroom. Doug kept swearing they were in there, but that’s where I had the Hawaii ornaments. I opened one of his dresser drawers and noticed a stack of gift cards. “Hey Doug, look at what I found.” He has a really bad habit of putting gift cards given to him in safe places and forgetting about them. One of the cards in the stack was a gift certificate I gave him when we first started dating in 1998.

Doug comes in and looks, and as I am putting the gift cards back, he decides to help me look for the Disney ornaments. He turns to the top of armoire, looks behind a stack of books and grabs a bag. “Hey, here’s a Best Buy bag, do you think they could be…”

Before he finishes the sentence, my head rotates 180 on my body, like something from the Exorcist. “Put that down!” I command, sounding like I am accusing of stealing the gold from Fort Knox. He just stares at me a minute and then sets the bag down. “You know better than to poke around at Christmas time!” I yell. With this, he starts laughing. I walk towards him saying, “you shouldn’t be such a snoop.” As the words come out of my mouth, he starts laughing harder, grabbing his belly and falling to the bed. The dogs think he’s having a seizure and start barking and licking him. As he wipes the tears of laughter from his eyes, he manages to say, “That’s the pot calling the kettle black – you have no room to talk.”

Okay, he has me there. I have quite a reputation for being a snoop, especially when it comes to presents. I like to say it was my journalism training combined with being a woman, but I was snooping long before my first journalism class. When I was young, I would take the wrapped presents from under the tree, slit open the tape on the side of the present, and see what was in the box. I knew that mom kept the Santa presents hide in her closet. I know peaking was horrible, but I was a kid.

Now that I’m older, I’m still a snoop, but not to the extent of purposely trying to find presents or unwrapping them. Still, Doug takes precautions. One year, when we were still living in Dallas, he decided to hide my present in the clothes dryer. I’m not really sure why, but I guess he figured I’d wouldn’t look in there. One morning I got up and reached in the dryer to grab a towel before heading to the shower. Luckily, I didn’t have my contacts in and was blind as a bat. Doug, however, wasn’t and saw this happen. He didn’t say a word, he didn’t even breathe, until I got into the shower. I missed the present by a half an inch and he decided he wasn’t going to let that happen again, so he grabbed the present out of the dryer and hid it someplace else while I was in the shower.

Of course he knows I have this insatiable curiosity and tries to bate me with it. “You know, your present is just sitting unwrapped on the front seat of the green car,” he tells me last night. He wants to see if I’ll go look. One year, to throw me off, he took huge box, filled it with computer manuals, just so I wouldn’t guess that inside was a pair of earrings. He loves trying to get me and makes a game of it. Unfortunately, when it comes to presents he doesn’t care. If his present was in bag in the front of the red car, he would take the car to run errands and never look in the bag. He makes me so mad that he doesn’t care, which he thinks is hilarious.

So of course, when he grabbed the bag, which had his present in it, I knew he wasn’t purposely peaking at his present. I also realized that the top of the armoire was a stupid place to hide it, even though he never looks up there and it was just temporary spot until he left the house and I could wrap the present.

Now he knows what one of his presents is, which he loves because he can tease me about it, only not too much, he he’s not quite sure if I will return it like I said I would, disappointing him because he wants that present. He also continues to taunt me about the present he got me. It’s just not fair. Luckily, we finally found the Disney ornaments this afternoon and they are on the tree. Too bad we could find them before Doug decided to snoop.