long weekend: day 1 of 4

Mark and I have decided to not do a crap load of holiday shopping this year. First of all, we can't afford it. Second of all, does anyone really need all the crappy crap that we give them for Christmas?? Scaling it back makes sense and my family seems to be in agreement with us.

Having said that, I spent the best part of today with my mum. Shopping. Yep. Today we woke up to our first major snow fall of the season. I'm happy to say that I'm not afraid of the snow anymore (I used to be a VERY nervous winter driver) so it didn't really intimidate me. Mostly, we were shopping for stuff to bake with. I had decided to give away baking to some folks we would normally buy something for (it's usually appreciated whenever I have done it in the past). We must have been at Costco for 2 hours and we got some great deals on our baking supplies. The nice thing about going with mum is that we split some things (like nuts and the like). She and I also got purchased some small gifts. Between Costco, Zellers and Shoppers (if I watch the flyers closely), I'm not finding that my sprawl-mart boycott is causing me any problems as far as shopping goes. A new, bigger sprawl-mart is scheduled to open here, early in the new year. It's my plan to never set foot in the place. They are just far beyond evil, it's disgusting. I literally cannot shop there anymore.

So, now I have most of what I need to get my baking done. I'm probably not going to start it for a week or more though. I like to do a marathon baking session right before Christmas and get it all done at once.

One thing that made me smile today: I found out that our new windows will be installed before Christmas. We ordered new windows for the first floor of our house and they are actually on their way to Kingston as I type this. We should have them installed the week before Christmas (around the 20th I think). Yay!!