My friend Sharon has a unique outlook on life.  Her observations and comments are often hilarious, sometimes jaw-dropping and always entertaining.

Three years ago she announced she was tired of Christmas.  She’d come up with a plan, informed her husband and two twenty-something daughters, and ignored all complaints:

Each member of the family would buy their own Christmas gift (something they really wanted), wrap it and put it under the tree.  Christmas morning they would unwrap their gifts and show the others what they bought.  That way, Sharon surmised, everyone would get what they wanted and would save money and time and energy.

Then they would go out for their traditional Chinese dinner and movie.

The rest of us (three out of four of our little band of writers) were speechless.  It went against every Santa-surprise-gift-giving rule of Christmas we had all followed for all of our lives.  We doubted it would work, but Sharon insisted she was finished with Christmas.  The girls were grown up and she was ready to move on.

That January, with the three of us tired and broke and over-shopped, Sharon’s Christmas idea didn’t seem quite so weird.  In fact, it might have been sheer genius.  Sharon told us her plan had gone really well.  One daughter had bought herself a ticket to Aruba for winter break, Sharon bought herself a new camera, and so on.

I confess to envy.

A few days ago she told me she was going to reinstate Christmas stockings this year.  She was going to fill her husband and her daughters’ stockings, which she’d realized she’d missed doing.  (Her gift to herself was going to be a fancy photo scanner, as she is the Keeper of the Family History in her large Irish family.)

But when she’d told her husband he had to fill a stocking for her this year, he panicked.   Really panicked.

“But Sharon, what am I supposed to put in it????!!!!!”

The poor man was freaked out, but Sharon showed no mercy.

“Michael,” she said, “You’ve known me for FORTY-ONE YEARS!!!!!!  How hard can it be?”

Ah, yes…

After 40+ years we are still a mystery to our husbands?

I think that’s a good thing.

2005: Son #1 contemplating Christmas stockings