Boxed In

Started the morning with breakfast and the Prep & Landing specials. This is Disney's take on how Santa still manages to deliver presents to millions of children every holiday season. Their answer - a high-tech covert operation of elves that makes sure every house is ready and waiting for Santa's arrival. In the first special, Prep & Landing, we meet Wayne, who has been working for the prep and landing department of the North Pole for literally hundreds of years. When he's passed over for a promotion, he gets upset and goofs around on the job...until it looks like a kid may not get toys because the house isn't ready.

Naughty & Nice takes us even further into how Santa makes use of 21st century technology. A kid manages to hack into Santa's naughty list. To stop her, Santa sends Wayne, his partner Larry, and to Wayne's annoyance, his coal-mining brother, who seems to do everything better than him. When the kid's dickering on the computer ends up turning the entire nice list into the naughty list, Wayne and his brother learn a lesson in working together to fix the problem. We also get two shorts, one with Wayne and Larry hunting down a gift for Santa in his office, and one with Tiny the office elf trying to fix coffee.

I packed the boxes with Linda and James' cookies and Lauren's presents while running the Sean the Sheep holiday and winter episodes. "We Wish Ewe a Merry Christmas" has the sheep and Bitzer the Dog showing how much they appreciate their farmer by decorating his home to make his holiday merrier. "Snowed In" shows the antics of the animals on a big snow day, including the farmer trying to ski off his roof. Bitzer is the "Fireside Favorite" when he gets sick. Pidsley the Cat doesn't like a dog hogging his usual spot and tries everything he can to get rid of him. The sheep sabotage his efforts. "Bitzer's New Hat" was a Christmas gift from the farmer's niece. It's rather ugly, and he just wants his old hat back. The naughty pigs aren't going to make retrieving it easy!

It took me a LOT longer to get the boxes together than I thought! The boxes I was using were from my Amazon Prime shipments last year. I tried to get as much tape off as I could, but finally gave up and just decided I wasn't going to get to the post office today. I taped them, put them aside, ate leftovers for lunch really fast, and hurried off to work.

Work probably wasn't worth the rush. It was once again mostly quiet. There was a bit of a rush around 2 or 3 PM as people started to come out of various church or synagogue functions or from the malls. Other than that and some cranky people, there were no major problems. My relief was one of the college boys, and he was right on time.

I had the shrimp I bought yesterday with Cranberry Flummery and the last of the Brussels sprouts for dinner. Ran the less-bizarre of the two mildly holiday-oriented Wonder Woman episodes.  "The Deadly Toys" has Diana Prince protecting two scientists who just destroyed their formula for a super-weapon after the third seems to have been replaced by a life-like robot. When a second scientist is replaced with a robot, Diana discovers all three scientists were fans of role-playing war games involving toy soldiers in make-believe battles. She discovers the toy soldiers came from one specific shop...whose owner can make life-sized robotic replicas of any human, including Wonder Woman.