I bought a few specifically Christmas things in the sales - like tree decorations from Newbridge silver at 25% or more off. And there were some Santa pepper pots (all the matching salt cellars were gone) that were nice so I bought 1 for our table at home (for €2.36, I thought I could spoil myself!).
But I didn't see anything otherwise that I wanted to get this year in advance. Some years I do, others I don't, and we're really not a family for the Boots smellies sets anyway. But I often hit the Summer sales and any Black Friday sales hard, to get things at bargain prices.
Today, I am dealing with DD who is high as a kite. Her class are doing a project at the annual Young Scientist's Exhibition and today is their day to present it. (Primary projects are whole class, and only 1 day presenting - secondary school students do them individually or in groups of up to 4, and must set up on the Wednesday and present it daily until Saturday). The "set-up team" were going on an early bus to town (8.15) with 1 mug parent who is supervising them, they were all buzzing at the stop!! The rest of the class will get that same public bus about 9am, and bus back to school for regular finish time (2.10), but there is a "late team" staying on to keep presenting and then dismantle the stand at 4pm. DD has volunteered to be on both extended ends of the day (there are 6 this morning, 8 this afternoon, and 4 of those are doing both ends). DD then has her first Scout meeting tonight, which is a night hike in a local woods - so she is going to be like a bag of rats tomorrow with tiredness and the come-down from all that build-up. (THe excitement this week every day - doing posters, getting soil from the school garden to fill recycled water bottles for their bar chart graphs, making up a number of scratch games to illustrate the project, buying and working out how to decorate pencils as prizes for those games, doing the actual data analysis and averages and statistics on which plants grew best, and learning a standard presentation for them all to use - it's a great idea to do but OMG is the teacher going to struggle tomorrow with a "normal" day!).