One of the suggestions of New Horizons was to take your host child Christmas shopping so he or she could also take part in the gift-giving at Christmas time. I thought that was a fabulous idea and there were about 15 people she could lavish gifts upon. With a crisp $20 in my purse, we headed off to the dollar store.
Let me set the scene.
The Dollar Tree...a couple days before Christmas...
The majority of the ornaments were no longer available for purchase... and the "good" gifts seemed to be a bit scarce. That's what I saw.
When we walked in, I told her to pick out a gift for each person in our family. We live near my parents and Josh's parents and she knew them from visiting with them. We had also shown her pictures of my family that would be coming up for Christmas. When I told her to pick out a gift for each person, her eyes lit up! She wasted NO time to start her Christmas shopping! I would tell her a name and she would search and search, high and low, until we found what she considered the PERFECT gift for each person. I found it absolutely intriguing what she chose. All the gifts she chose were very heavily thought over, rethought, and there were many times where she would find something different and put a previously picked item back. As I said, the pickins were scarce, but it did not deter her from finding some serving tray or tree ornaments to give.
Her taste in ornaments... well, they're MUCH different than my taste in ornaments! It seemed as though the bigger, the gaudier, the most 'out there' ornaments - were the best possible finds! She was thrilled to find these and quickly added them to the cart. At times we'd re-count and realize there were 20 items rather than 15 and we'd have to go through the roll-call again to see who was getting what and put back certain items. In the short time she was here, she had developed a bit of a crush on my brother-in-law and at one point, about 5 of the gifts were designated to him... Eventually, we got it down to 15. Some of the gifts included: a gum ball machine, a broom & dust pan, a deviled egg tray, a plastic serving platter, numerous gigantic ornaments, and a few other things such the like. We did end up putting back a few things because I decided they were not suitable gifts from her - which included a pair of underwear.
We then picked out some tape, wrapping paper, and ribbon... and paid for our goodies. I let her hand the money to the cashier and she was very excited as the crisp $20 became nothing but a few coins of change. She gave the change to me and we headed home to wrap our new treasures.
She had obviously never wrapped a gift before, but was more than excited to learn!
We took almost the entire afternoon to wrap gifts and re-designate certain gifts to certain people. We played Christmas music and ate Christmas cookies and really enjoyed that special time together. She was so excited to give her gifts to everyone and I was really excited for her! What a special treat Christmas was going to be for all of us!
