Introducing Zen-riette

It is December! And as terribly long and dreadful and dark and grey November is, it still kind of sneaked up on me. One of the very first things that marks the beginning of the Christmas season in our life is the much dreaded visit to the postal office to send the yearly presents and US Christmas snacks to family in Denmark (and the dresses. Never to forget the annual Christmas dress for our 8 year old niece). I hate going to the postal office. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it! It always ends up taking hours and costing in the vicinity of 200$. And because of this I alter my personality to Zenriette. The woman who will not lose her cool no matter what. When I got there yesterday it was no exception. First Zenriette challenge was to park the car as the parking lot there already had so many cars that I couldn’t squeeze mine in. But lucky for me Kristian had picked up custom forms I had filled out at home, so I “only” had to find the right-sized boxes, get them packed, wait in line and pay.......

As if!Turns out those forms were only for military shipments. And the lady at the counter rolled her eyes and gave me another set of forms to fill out. Back to work, writing down addresses and contents and values. Back in line to wait. And then it was finally my turn again. With another lady who rolled her eyes and asked me if I really was sure I wanted to send my parcels as express deliveries as that was quite expensive! And that I reallyneeded to fill out another set of forms then. By this time Zenriette was slowly beginning to crack and reveal the sizzling green monster underneath who would have happily started spewing piercing sarcastic comments left and right. But I went back to filling out forms (here are the two wrong ones. The upper one is clearly for military purposes only, right? So easy to see🙄)

1 hour and 15 minutes and 125$ later I was finally done. And since I had promised myself a visit to TJ Max afterwards - that’s where I went of course. I wanted to see if I could find something that resembled an advent wreath (usually only the giant door wreaths or graveyard wreaths are available). And believe it or not - I also managed to find unscented candles! And with a short visit to the pine trees outside I ended up with this:

Quite nice if I may say so myself.