How to do christmas shopping

Start in May.

Honestly. Start noticing now all the toys your kids take an interest in at the souvenir store on your spring break vacation. Take pictures behind their back and order it online. Start or continue to pay attention to the fact that your partner keeps complaining about a sore neck. Buy them a gift card to a full service spa, make it enough so they can pick an array of services. Spas that have salt scrubs, saunas, pools, different types of massages are good. Notice that hideous wall decoration that your mother says looks cool at the farmer’s market and make a note to buy it.

I have found all the best most meaningful gifts I’ve given have started with ideas that came about way in advance.

One year we got my wife a taxidermied white squirrel. She loves taxidermied animals. Especially small cute ones doing human things. We knew going into that holiday season that she wanted some kind of animal and after checking prices and availability we soon realized that we would have to aim small and do some digging.

By the way the whole time I’m talking with my kids about this. Getting them involved in the planning process. It helps us get excited for the holidays in advance. It helps give us something to plan for. It’s a good opportunity to learn about logistics like shipping times. It’s good for learning about where and how to find specialty shops.

Turns out we did find a specialty shop specializing in taxidermy. But everything was a little outside our comfort zone for price.

So we dug around. We googled and found an amateur taxidermist (scary right?) operating out of his house. I called him up just to ask some questions. Turns out he had exactly what we wanted. A small white squirrel that he had done for a client who never picked it up so he would let it go for cheap.

Awesome! All we had to do was drive way out in the suburbs and pick it up.

From there we outfitted this squirrel with a walking staff and a hat. How do you find a squirrel sized hat, well you look at small doll accessories. The walking staff ended up being a small stick we found outside.

The squirrel went over like gangbusters. The wife loved it.

This is not the type of gift you find the day before Christmas. It took months to plan and source.