What did you do for Christmas?

Mine was pretty good. I’ve told this story (which isn’t really even a story) a few times already, but I’ll tell it again. It’s pretty funny.

I used to have a pretty decent sized plastic pickle jar I would use to throw all my change in. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve also been tossing any change I’d accrue from my shopping endeavors in my car’s center console. After a while, as you can imagine, both locations filled with quarters, dimes, nickles and pennies. I even managed to save up four of those weird coin dollars.

A few days ago, I thought it was high time to cash in all my savings. Well, first I thought I was going to spend the change on various things, such as Chinese food and Pizza, but that didn’t work out too well.

After sitting around on a lazy Saturday afternoon, we managed to separate all the coins into their own zip lock bags. I did a little counting too. Just for the quarters though. Guess how much we had? Well, as it ends up, we saved over $110 in quarters. The reason I say the spending part didn’t work out above is because I’m not sure the Chinese lady appreciated my paying her $29.75 in quarters. She smiled, but I could tell she was wicked mad. I asked her if she had to roll all her change herself and she said yes. I felt pretty bad for her.

After coming back to the house with the food, I informed my better half that I couldn’t go around town paying people in quarters – much less dimes and nickles. She didn’t seem phased by what I had attempted – and came back with, “It’s money, isn’t it?” Yeah, but she wasn’t the one standing at the counter, swearing to the woman that the small stacks did, in fact equal $29.75.

Okay, let’s make a long story short. This last Saturday, I ran up to the bank and used their very handy coin counting machine to spit out a receipt telling me that I had just deposited over $181 in coins. I thought that was pretty good. We had already decided that we would use the proceeds to head over to the local market for some Christmas Eve and Christmas groceries. $181 turned out to help with that quite a bit.

So, yesterday we did our shopping. We bought all sorts of fish, shrimp, stuffed clams and scallops – and last but not least, dessert. The market I shop at has insanely good dessert. I picked out two mini cheesecakes and two mini fruit tarts. Again, seriously good.

Christmas Eve morning was spent up at my Jiu-Jitsu school for some casual training. We just hung out by ourselves and had a basic open mat, where everyone does what they want. After that, I did some work on my new trailer (which I’ll tell you about later), then shopped (above) and then drank wine and cooked the food we picked up. It wasn’t the typical “festive” Christmas Eve I typically picture, but it was good nonetheless. Later on, we watched a movie and fell asleep on the futon downstairs. 3AM rolled around and we found ourselves dragging our bodies upstairs to bed.

This morning was fair. I also purchased one of those gourmet loaves of bread for a nice Christmas Eve butter and blue cheese kind of thing – and used the leftovers we had to make French Toast. She used eggnog instead of milk, which added some pretty interesting sweetness. I thought that was nice. So we ate that, I worked a bit and here I am typing. We typically don’t eat breakfast until at least 2PM, so this isn’t that out of the ordinary.

Tonight, we plan on making Shrimp Scampi, warming up the stuffed clams and having some other things I can’t think of right now, so perhaps I’ll let you know how that goes. After that, our usual midnight walk and then sleep.

Until next time…