When I was little, there was a Christmas where everything turned up missing. As the Christmas Eve drew closer, my mom couldn’t find her thimble, scissors, and a handful of other household items. My sisters started missing some of her items, too.

That was the year I gave a lot of gifts. I was so excited about it.

As we opened up packages, the items turned up and I was discovered to have a gift for re-gifting. When you’re a little kid, it’s really hard to work within a budget of nothing when you want to wrap up lots of gifts for people.

I think I gave dad a rock.

Anyway, I started to make coupons after that, coupons that promised to do things like the dishes and not complain and would my sister Janet stop beating me up if I promised to make her bed? Coupons were another way to give a gift without having money.

My friend Mark received some coupons last week.

“These coupons have limitations,” I’d said. I promised to help him move to his new house (carry one book and help with the moving of one heavy item), buy him a coffee once a month for letting me store my bike in his garage, and help him make Christmas candy/gifts this year.

Mark altered the coupons. Dreadfully.

“Did you read your coupons?” he asked last weekend, suspiciously happy about showing me them. He’d taken a pen and scribbled out some of my limitations, changing the terms of the coupon to basically, for example, turn me into slave labor for the move this weekend.

“You’ve modified this coupon,” I said. “That makes it null and void.”

“There was nothing written on there about modifying coupons making them null and void.”

I just can’t win.

I’ll be doing a lot of heavy lifting this weekend. And a lot lot lot of Christmas baking in December.