The stars aligned so my cousin (whose blog you may have seen, at thisrarelyhappens.wordpress.com) were able to, for the first time in eight million years, go Christmas shopping together. Now we used to shop all the time, it was our favorite pastime and our greatest hobby. But you know, life, kids, husbands, life… they all get in the way. But here is a list of things that don’t change after years of not getting to Christmas shop together:

1. We still don’t know where the hell we parked after exiting the mall/Barnes & Noble/Starbucks/insertwhatevershop here. It doesn’t matter if we were in that store for four hours or four minutes, we will come out to the parking lot and look at each other like, “Did we even drive a car or were we magically transported here by Christmas elves? I can’t remember!”
2. We will, at some point, laugh so hard (about nothing) that the retail or wait-staff forced to wait on us will assume we’re high (we’re not) and that will make us laugh even harder (and, no, we don’t care that people are looking at us).
3. At some point, our laughter will turn serious and we’ll catch up on all the not-so-fun stuff going on in our lives.
4. One of us will still always love chocolate cake and one of us will hate it (obviously only the one who likes chocolate is right).
5. Lost. We’ll get so fucking lost. But then we’ll get not lost, and then lost again. But GPS is helping this matter out tremendously.
6. We’ll spend too long in the bookstore.
7. One of us will have a coupon for every single store we enter and know exactly what is on sale, when it’s on sale, and what coupon can be used when. The other one of us will be me saying, “There’s coupons for this store?!”
8. One of us won’t eat enough and will get so hungry she starts dropping the f-bomb like a comma. (Okay fine, that one is me, too).
9. We’ll end up buying the same exact shirt in one store but saying it’s okay because they’re different colors.
10. At the end of the weekend we’ll wonder why we don’t do this all the time.