Evening Out Gifts

When my girls were little I would line up 3 glasses when pouring their beverages and virtually used  a graduated cylinder to make sure no child received one more drop than the other. Because if the amount was not equal, a brawl would break out.  

One Christmas I arranged the gifts such that two of the piles were physically taller than the other one. Each of the three piles had the same number of gifts. The child who had the shorter pile began to cry. She thought her sisters got more than she did.

 I never made that mistake again.

I spent all of Black Friday Christmas shopping with various permutations of daughters. I have given up surprising them with gifts. I take them shopping so that no one experiences disappointment.

Scratch that. I take them shopping so I will not have to deal with their experiencing disappointment. It is all about me keeping my sanity and a peaceful kingdom.

  And on Saturday morning I set up an excel spreadsheet accounting every gift and its monetary value. And of course the columns were not equal. They never are. So we spent all day Saturday shopping together trying to hit the target budget number within a dollar or two. The only child who was successful was Samantha—the accountant. She completely zero-ed out. She was not a penny over or under. Briana--the finance major went over budget within a standard deviation—finance people view budgets as guidelines. And Kara, the management major is under budget—she is still exploring her options. All attempts at evening things out between the 3 of them resulted in failure.

When I went to Weight Watchers my leader warned the group of falling into the trap of evening out the cake syndrome. She warned that feeling the need to cut and consume the uneven cake slices led to a person to obesity. She offered the concept that it was okay if the cake looked a little crooked. Straightening it out was self-sabotage.  A cake will never look even no matter how much trimming you do. And so the lesson here is trimming cakes and budgets is a recipe for disaster. At Christmastime the only thing you should be trimming with certain success is your tree.