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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

I am just curious who still orders anything today with delivery expectation to get it before Xmas. From my experience the delivery drivers are today delivering tons of stuff ordered a week ago and they are so overloaded, that todays order might come only in January.

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Back in my day, everything was 6 to 8 weeks for delivery from catalogs (Sears Christmas Wishbook, anyone?) and the carriers were far less accessible when it came to tracking packages and whatnot than they are today. Honestly, those times seem like a cold-sweat nightmare, now. Speaking as an old man who regularly shakes his fist at passing clouds, I'm pretty damned happy with the current delivery times, even if they are occasionally a few days late. Those folks are out there breaking their backs for us and we'd best not forget it

Speaking from personal experience: people with ADHD, who don't have their shit together but desperately want to avoid disappointing the people they care about. People who then get hoodwinked by the bald faced lies everybody from Amazon right through to the courier staff will tell you about projected delivery dates and "oh, gosh, sorry, you know we just attempted delivery but couldn't get in!" (while you're sitting in front of the building)

My solution for this is to keep gifts for the people I buy presents for in mind throughout the year, and buy things as I come across them, then, when it's time to wrap, my wife and I lay things out and decide what actually gets gifted, excess gets set aside for upcoming birthdays (which are both fortunately early in the year, Jan. and March) or possibly even the next Christmas, then come April I start in on the process again.

I'm glad that works for you! The challenge with executive function issues is that it can be literally impossible to reliably do things like that in advance! Especially months and months in advance. It's also a challenge to delay gratification; when I find something that really speaks to me about someone, I really just want to give it to them straight away.

As a result I think I place a pretty low value on events centred around gift giving -- and yet I live in a society, etc.

I ordered everything Christmas related before December 1st.

Now I'm just holding my usual orders until after Christmas to avoid having stuff lost in the big rush.

Better to go with a digital gift card if you haven't received everything for now.

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