2 questions I really hate hearing

There are 2 questions I really hate hearing and they kinda come together every year:

• What would you like for Christmas?
• What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?

Seasonally the former arrives in our house from around mid-November onwards. And the answer is almost always: “I don’t know!” What use is that as an answer to a civilised question, after all, all I’m trying to do is find a gift that someone might like. And to make matters worse, when I ask my sons this question they always reply with “what do you want for Christmas?” and of course I don’t know either.

And then there’s New Year. “What are you doing for New Year’s Eve?”, as if it is the one night of the year where it is against the law to do nothing, to have no plan, to roll with the flow and see what happens.

This year, or is that really last year, I decided early on what I’d be doing for New Year: nothing, absolutely nothing. sure we had a nice dinner, but we made no plans go anywhere or be anywhere, we just enjoyed our own company without the New Year Pleasure Cops breathing down our necks. It was the nicest New Year we’ve had in a long time.

And the freedom a plan to do nothing gave us meant that we didn’t  have to worry about what we were doing on New Years Eve. Bliss.