You know Christmas sucks when your single and living alone. That means I visit my parents. Oh and for the first time this year its cheaper to buy the presents and fly my relatives in compared to shipping everything. I can get a group rate from Southwest for about 90 bucks round trip per adult and about 65 bucks round trip per child. Because I buy quite a bit of things that are somewhat heavy its going to cost me close to that for shipping because I have to mail everything out to different mail addresses and states. It seems that everything my family wants out of state always ends up being things that cost tons to ship. Like TV sets and such. So with that said all of my family is flying in at my expense and I'm going to have them over at my fathers house because he has enough bedrooms to hold everyone. My house just isn't big enough and its not small by any means.
This will be the first time in about five years that everyone will be together. Last time we all got together in Powell River, BC, Canada because we just didn't want to deal with snow that year for some reason.
On a side not I wonder if anyone does this for their kids. My parents use to have one very very big box about half the size of our 20 foot tree if that gives you any idea. They put all kinds of smaller boxes inside of it with various things such as gift cards and products but they take them out of their original packing so we don't have any clue until we open the smaller box with the product in it. We had two of them for my brother and I. We would get tons of things such as music cds and laserdiscs along with gift cards for about twenty different stores. They gave up trying to figure us out in our teenage years so they settled with gift cards. Just make sure if you do this with gift cards in a bigger amount you as the parent keeps a list of what is in it and make sure that your child has found them all. I was lucky because I happend to stuff all the paper in the bag and one of the gift cards fell out from between the papers. That gift card was one of "my" 200 dollar Circuit City gift cards and boy was I ticked at myself for almost throwing that away. My parents learned their lesson next year.
That for me was just fun so if you don't do this give it a try. If you have a teenager that you have just given up shopping for give this a try because you would be amazed at how fun your kids would have.
What's going to fill under your christmas tree this year? Post photos of your Christmas tree. 
