Holiday time came at no exception to this rule...err, motto. She tended to wait until after the actual holiday passed and scooped up the sales when she saw them, gifting her friends and family their tokens of affection…. Just a couple days late.
She always bought stuff for the next year too, with the thought of making sure to save the stuff so she could actually give them things on time for a change… but inevitably, always, she managed to lose or misplace said item before it was time to hand it over.
Chocolates and candies were inevitably consumed within the month of February, sometimes March. She tried gift cards once but they were in turn used during one of her low-money months (she’d called in a few too many times to her kiosk job) and the gift cards were used for purchase dinner… at least a couple times.
Toys disappeared within her own collection whether she wanted them to or not. It was easy to forget what was supposed to be set aside for others and what she’d set aside for… well, her.
She was on her way home from the mall when she stumbled across the flower table. It was a quaint little thing, covered in more handmade posters than Ashley would never care to spend the time to make. It all looked like a bunch of unnecessary effort but she supposed that just came with the territory of hosting fundraisers and the like. She could appreciate the attempt to raise money, though purchasing flowers seemed like a pretty simple enough gift.
Wait….hmm.
Flowers wouldn’t be a bad idea, after all. And it’s not like she’d had any other alternative for buying gifts yet, this year. She could always chance it and go with another alternative… but she really hadn’t been putting too much thought into what to get folks this year, as it was. And the flowers were right there, primed and ready for plucking.
Reaching into her wallet, Ashley fished around for the money asked by half of the large, handpainted signs. For a single little flower, they were asking more than Ash would normally pay for flowers (not that she’d ever really pay for something she could pick up off of the sidewalk or out behind the dumpster of a floral shop or out by a cemetery…) but after finagling with the girl and the two one dollar bills she held out in her hand, she managed to walk away with two… unusually colored blossoms to give to her two unusual friends. They didn’t have to know that she’d purchased the cheapest ones because the girls couldn’t sell that particular color… they didn’t have to know anything at all except that Ashley had been AMAZING and bought them flowers for friend-day or whatever commercialized holiday they were gonna celebrate.
Success!!
To Austen:
kuropeco
To Debs:
AMItotic
