There’s Nothing Wrong With Surprise Books

I am notoriously fond of spoiling the crap out of the people in my life. I love planning surprises (usually without telling anyone) and springing them on my unsuspecting friends and family without a word.

One of my favorites was back in January when Andy and I were out at Disneyland. I had booked us the “Walt In Walt’s Disneyland Footsteps” Tour. I kept it from just about everyone, which was hard because as good as I am as surprises; I’m also terrible at them.

I drove Andy insane as the time for the tour grew closer because he was super nervous that I was planning something embarrassing… this stemmed from Cruella pulling him in to be a part of the firehouse show the day prior. It was hilarious to anyone who was not Andy.

The tour was an extreme success and we both had a wonderful time. I would actually highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about Walt’s history and that of the Disneyland Park. In addition, we got to tour the Dream Suite which was AWESOME. New life goal would be to stay in that suite.

It’s gorgeous.

I digress.

This past Saturday night I was spending some quality time with my copy of Jenny Lawson’s “You Are Here” and decided that my sister, Shannon, would really enjoy the book as well. She like weird and she enjoys coloring so it seemed like a win.

I decided to surprise her with a copy. As I was ordering I realized that she had no idea who Jenny was and so it was going to be weird to randomly send “You Are Here” her was with absolutely zero context.

Not to be deterred I decided it would only make sense to send along one of Jenny’s other books. I settled on “Furiously Happy” as I’ve been re-reading it more than is probably healthy for a human being.

With the decision made, I hit order and sent some books off her way.

So began the waiting game.

Thanks to Amazon Prime, the little surprise would be arriving Monday morning which actually turned out to be perfect. The Northeast is currently getting slammed with a blizzard and Shannon, a teacher, has the today off.

I’ll go ahead pretend like I planned it all to happen that way.

I got the delivery notification early in the day while Shannon was still as school and I promptly waited for her reaction to getting home and finding the package.

I then started to freak out that she would freak out. I mean, I knew she’d be weirded out by receiving an unexpected package but then I took a moment to think about how she’d react to receiving a book with an overly excited dead raccoon on the cover. (For context, meet Rory).

Then I realized that she’s related to me and frankly she should be expecting this kind of randomness from me.

I called her this afternoon to see what she thought and so far so good. She actually applauded the surprise since it was so out of the blue.

Her reaction was fun because she’s just as bad as I am when I comes to online shopping. We’re both big fans of doing some dream shopping and loading up our carts until we remember we’re broke and empty it out again. Her reaction was as follows:

“I saw the package and was like ‘I didn’t order anything from Amazon’ and then I got super freaked out that I got drunk and bought something but then I opened it was was like ‘is that a raccoon?'”

Then she found the gift note.

I love random gift giving.

Ya’ll have been warned.

UPDATE: My sister has been enjoying “You Are Here” and sent me this picture of a finished coloring page:

For the record, spellcheck wants to corrected “weired” to warded and now I’m in a Game of Thrones mood. But I have to go to the doctor. Violence and bloodshed will have to wait… for later.