Boxes, boxes and more boxes!

Christmas is a time for giving. Thank goodness for outfits like the UPS Store and Mailboxes, etc. in addition to the good ol' United States Postal Service to help deliver those gifts to places far and wide. Since we're spending the holidays at home this year, that means all gifts for out-of-town family members must be mailed pronto. Everyone who knows me is well aware that promptness is not a virtue with which I've been blessed, so getting all those boxes to their destinations by Christmas has turned into quite a challenge! The mailing deadline for items going to Frank's FPO in Iraq was December 4 - that was really pushing it! We'd already agreed to wait and have a sort of belated Christmas when he comes home on R&R in January, but he needed something under the tree (which he still has in his possession from last year) so I scurried to get a few small things together and made it by THE last possible day. One box down and umpteen to go... Next in the lineup was a big stack of things my cousin, Jim, bought while he was visiting here from Fort Worth over Thanksgiving. We decided it would be better for me to mail them to him so he wouldn't have to worry about checking them on the plane. The only problem was finding one box big enough to put all those smaller boxes in. Working and daily events left little time to find a giant box. Finally, there just happened to be a used Public Storage box left over at the office when we finished our Secret Santa drive (more about that another day) and it was the perfect size! I loaded everything up and took the big giant box to UPS on the way home this evening - about 10 minutes and $16 dollars later, that errand was a done deal. Now on to wrapping and mailing the things for an aunt and cousins in Texas, an aunt in Wyoming, and the whole Arkansas clan. Until that's done it looks like the den will continue to be strewn with boxes, boxes and more boxes! Now where did I put that jumbo roll of packing tape?