Father's Day

Father's Day is almost upon me, and I am somewhat less than prepared.

This is SO unlike me.  I am always thinking about the next gift-giving holiday at least a month in advance.  I love giving presents, especially when it is for a holiday where mushy, sentimental gifts are in order.  

It's not like I haven't been thinking about Father's Day.  Quite the contrary.  I've actually been thinking about it for months.  I even had an idea for D that I was totally sold on - a new coffee maker that can produce coffee faster than the slow-mo machine we currently have.  D always gets so frustrated with our coffee maker.  He takes coffee to work every night, and he always has to start making it half an hour before he is ready to leave so he'll have enough time to add so much creamer and sugar that it barely resembles coffee.  On nights when he forgets to start the coffee maker, he has to go buy yucky coffee from the machine at work(which he calls "crappuccino").  So I thought a speedier coffee maker would make him happy.

So I figured I'd drop a few hints and try to discern how he'd feel about that idea, without giving away that I was planning to get him one.  I don't remember how I did it, but when I dropped the hint, he obliviously replied "I don't need a new coffee maker."  Great.  Scratch that plan.

It seems like this happens a lot.  I try to come up with a good surprise gift for D and it doesn't work out.  It's because D and I come from completely different schools of thought regarding gift giving.  Me, I'm really into surprises.  I love them.  There is nothing that I love better than a genuine surprise.  It's probably because I'm so nosy intuitive that it's very hard to surprise me.  I love a surprise, but I also love sniffing out a surprise.  I kind-of suck that way.  

D, on the other hand, could not care less about surprises.  He is 100% fine with buying something for himself and then just telling the gift giver to pay him back for it.  His worst nightmare is walking into a surprise party in his honor.  

When we were dating, we exchanged gifts for Christmas.  I don't even  remember what we got each other, but I do remember that my gifts to D were a bunch of small, wrapped packages and D's gifts to me were....all thrown into a shopping bag.  Not even a gift bag - a shopping bag.  We had to have a talk about how gifts should be wrapped always, no it doesn't matter if it's a waste of paper, no it doesn't matter if the paper is just going to be thrown out, no you can't just throw it in a gift bag with no tissue paper or anything, and giving a gift in the shopping bag from when you bought it is worse than just giving the gift without wrapping it.  

And the first year we were married, D was indignant that I expected all my presents to be wrapped under the tree.  Which I totally don't get!  I mean, part of the thrill of Christmas is coming downstairs to see the tree all lit up with a bunch of mystery presents underneath it.  And yes, I'm still a little kid and I always put D's gifts under the tree first, then run upstairs while D puts my presents under the tree so I can have the moment of seeing all the gifts on Christmas morning.  

So the point of these stories is that D is not so much with the sentimental.  So here it is, almost Father's Day, and no brilliant idea yet.  He works on a printing press, so any type of picture something for the "office" is out of the question.  He doesn't wear jewelry or anything except his wedding ring (reason #576 why I love him), so....yeah, I guess that doesn't matter because I'm pretty sure that I still wouldn't know what to give him if he did wear jewelry.  Except I did find this awesome leather cuff on Etsy that can be engraved, which would be perfect for my brother but not D.  He's just a guy.  Anything sentimental that he could receive would be sentimental because his child(ren) created it or picked it out, and we're not quite there yet.

So I went out with L and just bought D some summer clothes.  He wants them, he needs them...it's a very practical gift.  But I've made a decision to give D some things that money can't buy.  I'm going to laugh at his jokes.  I'm going to cease nagging him for the entire day, no matter what he does to annoy me.  I might even make him these homemade pretzels that he loves, which is a HUGE deal because I absolutely hate making them.  They are a royal pain in the rear, but he is bananas over them.  (I sincerely hope he isn't reading this because if I change my mind, not only will he not let me forget it, he'll have it in print that I said I'd do it.)      

These things will mean far more to D than anything I can buy.  And really, I just want him to know that I appreciate him, because he's an incredible husband and father.  Maybe one day I'll be able to knock it out of the park and come up with a really great surprise, but until I can afford season tickets to the Wings, I guess I'll stick to acts of kindness.  And t-shirts.