(no subject)

[wolffyluna]

Christmas was reasonably good this year. The 'relatives that are in this city that aren't all booked up on Christmas' is both a reasonably small number and lines up pretty well with 'relatives we like,' so we were able to have a lovely (if wildly over catered) Christmas lunch.

(Seriously, it was only afterwards that we realised "...wait, we had one Meat Thing per person... and one of those Meat Things was Most Of A Pig's Leg")

And I am also filled with warm fuzzies about the some of the gifts I got.

For context, because most of don't know my Dad: When I am talking about being surprised by things he did, I'm not surprised because they were wildly out of character, but more because I am very often "you... you remembered and acted on things you knew about me? [surprised pikachu.png]" regardless of who does it.

I knew most of my Christmas presents in advance. A weighted blanket, some wool of my favourite brand, some "I don't know what to get you and don't enough time for it to arrive by post if I do find something-- go buy yourself something nice" money that got converted in rocks for my collection.

But partway through the gift opening, my dad presented me and my mother some surprise gifts . He had decided he was going to ~sneak off~ to the bookstore and get us surprise books.

"Oh, and Wolffy, I've given you the receipt in case you want to return the books, because they weren't quite what I meant to get you."

"Hmm?"

You see, he likes to ask what I've been up to over breakfast, and for the past few months it's been things like "Oh, I've just been reading this translated Chinese [pause as I think how to describe it]... detective novel" "...novel about necromancers" "novel about a god and a ghost who hangs around him" And he remembered this, and went to the book store and was like "I would like your finest Chinese novels, good sir!"

To which the shop assistant was like "...I'm sure we have some, but I don't know enough to recommend any in particular. Would bleak Japanese literary fiction suit? I can certainly recommend some of those."

And thus I was given some bleak Japanese literary fiction. Which I'm probably not going to return, because while those books wouldn't have been what I chose for myself, they seem good and like they might be up my alley. And "wouldn't have picked it myself but probably up my alley" seems like an ideal Christmas gift.

But I'm still going "!!! You remembered the books I mentioned at breakfast! And then you used that information to try and find me a Christmas present!"