The difficulties of Christmas shopping.

This is the difficulty of not posting properly for a few days: I now have lots of things I want to share !!! You have been warned, this may be a long post (tho I may split it up into 2!)

Have had a nice if fairly packed day today. After a fairly substantial lie in (very needed!), I went down to broadmead this morning to start some Christmas shopping. (I know that I won't have any time after I get home from uni before Christmas, so need to be organised now).

Buying Christmas presents is REALLY difficult I find, (as in fact buying any present is). I think it must be due to the fact that as humans we are ultimately selfish creatures, when left to our own devices, and so when I want to buy a present for someone, I subconsciously find myself looking around the shops and seeing what things I like, and I guess most of the time I end up buying things I would like if someone was buying a present for me. At the end of the day, that's not what buying a present for someone is all about. It should be about buying something which will bring joy to the other person. I've been trying hard recently to change my attitude to present buying, and try to get into the other person's shoes, so to speak, and actually think about what THEY'D like ! Sounds obvious and really straightforward I know, but in practise it is actually really hard, because most of the time, because we are all so different, what the person likes and what I like are two completely different things, and I constantly have to keep bringing my mind back to the fact that I'm not shopping to buy myself things. But, whenever I have done this, it's always in the end been more satisfying: both for me when I've bought the present and for the person receiving the gift. Hmmm...(or maybe I think too deeply about things which shouldn't be thought about that deeply ? I do have a tendency to as I have been told.)

Anyway, I think I did reasonably well for having only had 3 hours - most of my Christmas shopping is now done, plus I had the fun task of buying lots of decorations for our house !!!! (Our Christmas tree looks really cool !!)