A tisket, a tasket...

A fucking Christmas basket.

The holiday season around here is a busy one. At exactly 12:01am on the day after Labor Day, the planning begins. And once you take off your Halloween costume, be prepared to spend at least one day of every weekend in the coming months partaking in mandatory fun events. Christmas tree lightings, holiday parties, military balls, ornament decorating parties, fun runs -- you name it, we're probably doing it. After a while, it becomes exhausting especially when my ideal Christmas involves multiple viewings of "A Christmas Story," slightly burned cookies and a bottle of Glenlivet.

But to add even more insult to injury, these things are never quite planned to the extent they should be. A few people get together, and become so inspired by what CPT Dick calls the "good idea fairy," they come up with a - *gasp* - good idea for some event. It will promote family togetherness! Unit, errr, unity! But alas, somewhere in between all the dolphin clapping for brilliance, they forget that it will actually take a fair amount of doing to get it all pulled together. And when these good ideas are discovered in Bible Study or perhaps during a random trip to the PX, the purveyors of said ideas need to effectively communicate what they need to other people in order to actually accomplish it. Unfortunately, the necessity of this is not well understood in my world. Well, not until 12 hours before go time, anyway.

And so, I must come up with a Christmas basket.

One of this year's good ideas is a raffle for Christmas baskets. As an FRG leader, apparently, I was supposed to create one of these incredible baskets. And I was supposed to do so yesterday. This is all news to me. And when I received the panicked call asking where my Christmas basket was, I could glean no more information from the messenger. I have no idea how much I should spend, who's paying, or what the theme might be (and note: with military wives, there is always a theme - life might cease to exist without a theme). Apparently, when I missed the ladies' chapel group, I missed out on all the guidance.

So now, instead of getting some work done or playing with my kid, I get to spend my afternoon racing around for the perfect components of a holiday basket without any fucking clue of what exactly that should entail (I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the purchase of an actual basket won't be too cliche). I'm not really crafty anyway, but given the information I have, you can bet that my basket is going to be either totally ghetto or four times the size and cost of everyone else's.

All I know is, the next time the "good idea fairy" comes out to play when I'm around, I'm going clip that bitch's perky little wings. And now, if you'll excuse me, I must go shopping.