I started my Christmas shopping and planning! 🎅🙈 Things sell out fast, and I wanted to get ahead of it where I live. My family has gotten away from stocking stuffers because it adds up. But my grandma is getting older with dementia, and there are fewer of us here now since some family moved away, so I feel it's really important to make good memories with her.

I was recalling what my mom used to put in our stockings as kids to come up with ideas of what to get them. We were not rich, but my dad knew how to spend his money, so we felt like we had a lot and we didn't go without because he was always thrifty and drove older vehicles.

Christmas felt like such an event. Later, I realized my mom was giving us necessities all at once : toothbrushes, socks, sometimes even toothpaste, hair scrunchies, a new brush every year, Chapstick, candy of all sorts to fill space, maybe a little bit of money wrapped cleverly in something, and a bunch of other little things like that.…