So Christmas 2016 has come and gone. From the perspective of a knitter, the success of Christmas might be measured by how much knitting was or was not done. For the organised and rational knitter, a good Christmas holiday would have included some stress-free knitting in a comfortable, warm nook. For the rest, there would be varying amounts of (probably frantic) knitting taking place during any free moment available, sometimes in unlikely places in order to meet a deadline. Since I decided to embark on Christmas gift knitting sometime in early December, I should have fallen squarely among the latter group, but I did rein in my ambitions to three, relatively small projects, which had to be done or abandoned before I left for the holidays.
But that said, how did I do, really? I decided to assess it by the numbers and I issued myself a Christmas knitting report card based on the three projects I had decided to make.
In truth, I don't really deserve that A+ for attendance because the majority of the Christmas gatherings I was invited to were all scheduled for days I wasn't even in town. Which is to say, my performance for a mere three small projects was pretty disappointing even if I thought it didn't go as poorly as some previous years. I think the conclusion is obvious; I should really just knit for myself and I can do it guilt-free because this report card confirms everything I knew to be true about (my attempts at) gift knitting. Which is, it rarely ends well.
(If you would also like to issue yourself a Christmas knitting report card, feel free to print one for yourself.
If this were a fancy-like blog, I would have it generate your grades for you, but that is not where my skills lie. You'll have to do it the old-fashioned way.)
Luckily, internet shopping has reached a level of efficiency that allows me to get to inside a week of Christmas Day to decide (objectively)* if the project in hand can be completed in time or if I need to order something right now. Incidentally, I used to think I would rather be kept awake for three days straight by the barking of dogs and the clashing of garbage bins being knocked over by raccoons rather than brave a mall even once in the weeks before Christmas. This year, having been forced to make a few trips to various malls, I found that it was surprisingly not utter pandemonium. I'm going to attribute this to the rise of internet shopping. Some people think the internet is destroying meaningful human interaction but I'm now rather inclined to think that it might be saving us all.
But back to the subject at hand. Clearly, deciding to knit gifts a mere handful of weeks before Christmas is never a sound plan, yet somehow I convinced myself to give it a try anyway. It would probably be smarter to set the publish date for this post for sometime in November of 2017 as a sort of wake-up call, a reminder to my future self of the inevitable outcome of last-minute gift knitting which you know I will be contemplating again in eleven month's time, but that would be planning ahead.
Footnotes
*I'm not sure if I'm alone in this, but in the past, when the clock was running down and I still hadn't completed a project, I would then, through some strange logic, convince myself the answer was to forego some hours of sleep per day for the remaining days before Christmas instead of just going out and buying a gift to replace the one I wasn't going to be able to finish. Like I said in my last post: madness. Internet shopping allows me to get that close to a deadline and not lose my grip on reality.