Mistletoe Neighbor Gifts for Christmas 2011. FAIL.

Let's talk about the clever neighbor gifts that sister, Becca, and I dreamed up.

Credit is due to our dear neighbors, the Dew family, back in our hometown, who have given a darling little bag of mistletoe for the last few years as a neighbor gift.  We thought it was so original. So fun. So cool!  Because we BOTH live in Texas now, we thought we should jump on the fun gift train and give to those we enjoy.

I called our sweet neighbor and she happily told me the website she ordered from and all the ins and outs of ordering.  Awesome.  They were pretty inexpensive (being less than a dollar per pre-bundled sprig) and we went ahead and ordered the minimum quantity of 50!  Becca and I decided to split the order and I waited by the mailbox.

They came earlier than expected (cool!) and Aaron, Tillie, and I got to work tying on little red bows and inserting the sprigs into mini ziplock bags (that I already had purchased from Hobby Lobby).  The instructions said to keep the mistletoe refrigerated.  I thought since it was so cold outside, that storing the box in the garage would be fine.  Not so.  We live in WARM Texas.  They were fine for a few days as we started delivering a few each night (we wanted to take some to several people from our church---and since the boundaries for our ward are so far reaching, we could only deliver a few each night before we were worn out).

Well, a few days turned into a week, and then another week, and what do you know?  The mistletoe sprigs had dried up.  Like majorly.  And, having them jostled and moved around in the box night after night didn't help.  All the leaves fell off their little branch and there was nothing really salvageable about it.

So, how many did we end up delivering?  I think 8.  Which means 17 just went to waste.  Boo.  And that, my friends, is a neighbor gift FAIL.

Moral of the story?  FOLLOW MANUFACTURER INSTRUCTIONS.  I had put two of the baggies in the fridge right after we had gotten them.  Yep. They were in mint condition weeks later.

You might wonder, well, if you do this again next year, and you already have given the sprig of mistletoe, won't the recipients' dry up and crumble if they don't keep theirs refrigerated?  Well, I wondered that too, but the sprig we hung up when it was fresh, stayed in the same condition b/c it wasn't jostled and shaken around in a box being tampered with.  It just dried up in it's original state.
Does that even make sense?

Anyway, we'll try again next year!

p.s. funny side note: Becca chose to write on her stickers, "Merry Kissmas! from Becca"which I thought was super funny.  She got some strange looks from her MARRIED MALE co-workers. hAAA!!!  I told her she should have said when she delivered them, "Don't read into my gift."  But alas... !!! hA!