The Commitment of Stickers

I've always loved stickers. Since I was little, every time I would find a sticker I had to stick it onto the closest flat surface I could find.

This resulted in my grandmother's mirror and the dinner table filled with pointless stickers.Where I would acquire so many stickers remains a mystery even to this day.

But out of all the stickers I had, I remember having more than twenty of the happy face stickers Walmart used to give out. Every time I would go to Walmart I would get a sticker from the nice lady in the entrance. Little me was always very excited to go to Walmart for the promise of increasing my growing collection of happy faces.

Walmart happy face sticker

Now that I look back I was foolish to think that those stickers would last forever. Around the age of seven those precious stickers were snatched away from my reach and stashed in the back of the store to never again see the light of day.

I am fond of those distant memories of happy face stickers but I took them for granted.

My later discovery of the scratch-and-sniff stickers would bring on a new phase and would question my commitment.

When stickers look pretty and on top of that smell delicious, it has got to make you ask the question, am I ready for this kind of commitment? If you have ever had a nice sticker, you understand that once you stick it somewhere, it will forever stay, unless you are willing to ruin it.

These scratch-and-sniff stickers were a wonderful thing and brought great popularity to me in the third grade because I owned seven full sheets of them. However, in the end it proved pointless and I lost three unused sheets because of my commitment issues.

THESE ONES

Now whenever I get my hands on stickers they tend to be very nice stickers that I purchase with my own money. It's just like buying a very nice notebook only to never use it, but we'll leave that topic for another day.

I love my money, but Christmas

(Co-written with Teresa)

We both love Christmas, but what stresses us out most about the holiday season is the prospect of shopping for gifts. The impending holiday provides a strict deadline for us to acquire the perfect presents for our friends and family.

Even though we love and are very close with the people for whom we are searching for gifts to give, we have the hardest time picking out appropriate presents that they would appreciate.

With seven friends in common, we struggle to pool together enough money to satisfy the demands of our high maintenance squad.

For everything to come out perfectly we must correctly time our online purchases so that they arrive at our homes in a timely manner for us to be able to wrap them up properly.

As we approach winter break, the desperation to get a good deal on purchases heightens, leading to the long lines of Black Friday sales. Black Friday sales tend to involve extreme amounts of glaring and shoving, and thus are not pleasant to say the least. But this is the only way to find a present to appease the disastrous crew I swing with.

our go to place to buy just about anything (form China)

Teresa’s dependency on my debit card is unbelievable. She is also the one I have the hardest time shopping for, she tends to be a very picky and overall an expensive friend. Buying her present this year absolutely drained my wallet and I almost didn't have enough for everyone else. But whatever, she’s worth it.

me

In the end, even though Christmas shopping is draining in all ways, it’s a price we’re willing to pay for the people we treasure.