Holiday Surprise!

Last year in September I moved out to the United Kingdom to attend Kingston University for my MA in journalism and when October came around my mother was toying with the idea of bringing me home for a surprise visit, but funds were low (on her end).

Right then I started scheming.

I talked with my new friend Felicia about my potential plans to go home for Christmas to surprise my family; she thought it was a great idea and directed me to some cheap airline sites, which I viewed later that evening.

HUZZAH! I found cheap tickets and purchased them straight then.

All I had to do now was find a way to make sure my Xmas gifts wouldn't be sent to the UK, and I knew just who to talk to.

I told to my brother's girlfriend, Nicole, about my plans and asked for her help; here's when it gets fun.

I told her to tell my mother that she had found a great shipping deal on the Living Social site and to tell her that she thinks it'd be a great idea to ship them out together and that my mother should just give her the things to send out.

That's not the end of that, mind you my brother is a FedEx employee with a wonderful discount.

Here's where I started to run into some troubles, but it was nothing I couldn't solve!

My mother was then going to hold off on sending anything of mine until Christmas with Nicole's great 75% off! So I quickly played the sad far off student card and quilted her into sending my stuff sooner with my brother's discount and saving the Christmas things for Nicole's deal in December (only time it was valid).

Now the only thing I had to do was find "plans" for Christmas in the UK.

I came up with the idea to tell my family, who, by the way, were all clueless to my plans, that I was going to Scotland with Felicia, whose grandparents moved there from Texas, where she's from.

Complicated, I know.

My mother quickly came up with a plan to send them a gift for their hospitality towards me, hahaha.

So, by the end of October I had all of this planned out, now the only thing was keeping the charade up until December 16, the day I would surprise my family at a bogus planned meal at Hacienda Colorado for Nicole's "birthday".

Nicole picked me up, we went to her house, surprised my brother then went to the restaurant. They went inside to meet them, and Brian, my brother, filmed the success of all my scheming: