Last year, I mailed my business Christmas cards on December 28. Procrastination has always been my downfall but I was wholeheartedly determined to not let that happen again this year! I purchased my business holiday cards in September (at a great discount, I might add). I opened the box, reviewed my order and was very pleased with myself and my pro-activeness. After looking at my holiday cards, I put them back in their box and decided it was a good idea to put them in a back corner in the storage room until I needed to use them.
Many months passed but I still felt confident that I would be ahead of the game this year. I prepared my holiday cards mailing list and updated everyone’s addresses in October. November rolled around, Thanksgiving seemed to happen entirely too early this year, and then all of a sudden it was December. When I finally decided to get started with addressing the envelopes, I couldn’t find the box. Eventually I noticed it in another corner of the storage room. I pulled several heavy boxes off the top and then noticed something else was awry – two of the box corners were completely chewed through. I carefully pulled back the covers of the box and immediately confirmed my suspicions – a mouse and several of its cohorts had decided to make a home out of my box of business holiday cards.
After a slight panic attack (and the donning of some sanitary white rubber gloves), I came to the realization that most of the cards were salvageable. I did have to place a last minute order of 25 more personalized holiday cards but received them in a matter of days so I was still able to get my holiday cards out on time. I am already looking forward to ordering my cards early again next year to save some last minute headache! Let’s just hope the mouse problem resolves itself by then.
Did your mouse problem resolve itself? It sounds like you were relatively calm when faced by missing Christmas cards in December. I really hope the mice were gone by the time you opened the box.
That’s pretty funny. Not the mouse bit of course but I used to buy Christmas gifts early on in the year and by Christmas time I could never remember where I hid the gifts if I even remembered buying something. I ended up buying more gifts and eventually found the first ones mid year or so. Now if I buy something for a later date I add an appointment in my Outlook calendar to let me know where I stashed it. I send myself a reminder on the 1st of each month that tells me where the gifts are. For about 6 months I get the annoying reminder but when Christmas time comes it helps.