She Won’t Be Rushed Into Holiday Mood
There are actually people out there--some of my best friends, as the saying goes--who finish their Christmas shopping every year before the end of October.
By and large, these are the same people who always know exactly what their checking account balances are, right down to the most recent service charges. They also tend to have alphabetized spice racks, closet organizers and clean desks.
My contempt for these folks is right up there with the way I feel toward the kind of women--again, some of my best friends--who give birth after less than three hours of labor and then say something outrageous like, “For the first hour and a half I thought it was probably just indigestion.”
I don’t envy these people--that’s not it at all. Nor do I aspire to be like them. I just want them to suffer the way the rest of us do.
“It’s so much easier to find a parking place if you do it early,” one friend advised me last year in mid-October. Smugly, she announced that her Christmas shopping was all done.
“Have you started yours yet?” she nagged.
“I haven’t even started my Halloween shopping yet,” I grouched. “Don’t rush me, OK?”
“But if you wait, it’s going to take you a lot longer and everything will be more expensive and there won’t be as much stuff to choose from and . . . “
“I know,” I broke in. “Everything you’re saying makes perfect sense.”
“Does that mean you’re going to do your shopping early this year?” my friend asked, sniffing victory.
“Of course not.”
In early November, when the first ads with little pictures of Santa all over them start showing up in my newspaper, I toss them aside without so much as a “Bah, humbug!” Not only is it too early to think about Christmas, but it’s even too early to get angry at all those people who are trying to make me think about it.
“It can’t be time for that stuff again,” I tell myself. But the calendar does not lie. I feel a small pang of guilt for being so far behind schedule. So I dig out that “Things to Do” list I made back in August (or was it April?) and cross off a few more items. But only a few.
My penchant for procrastination, however, isn’t the sole reason for my foot-dragging when it comes to playing Santa. For me, the Christmas spirit isn’t something that can be turned on and off like a switch. Every holiday season, I have to get used to the idea all over again.
As any of my friends can tell you, it’s not that I don’t enjoy buying gifts. That’s something I do all the time: sometimes big ones, sometimes teensy ones, almost always unexpected. I just don’t like being told when to buy them. Deep down, of course, I know that the very vitality of the economy depends on the cooperation of people like me. Many stores, I’ve read in the business pages, make 50% or more of their annual sales this time of year, which means they have to hire more people and then those people chip in a good portion of their paychecks to the cause, and it’s that kind of symbiosis that helped capitalism win the Cold War.
I even met a woman the other day who owns a store that’s open only during the Christmas shopping season, and because of its success, she’s able to stay home with her children the rest of the year. If I don’t buy at the prescribed time, I could be depriving those kids of their mother’s attention. The sense of responsibility weighs as heavily on me as Santa’s pack must feel on his shoulders.
Still, when the first giant plastic candy canes go up on the light poles at my neighborhood shopping center a few days before Thanksgiving, I glare at them and mutter something about “crass commercialism.”
Then my neighbors all put their Christmas lights up, and that just makes me grouchier--or is it grinchier? “Not yet!” I shout at all those blinking, twinkling reminders. “Just don’t rush me, OK?”
The weather here in Orange County doesn’t help either, although I wouldn’t have it any other way. Every Santa Ana wind that blows puts Santa Claus further from my mind. I want to rush off to the beach, not the mall.
Eventually, however, we get a misty, chilly day, and I decide to embark on a scouting mission. Not actual shopping, you understand--just a preliminary look around. I wander discreetly from store to store, playing with various gadgets, making mental notes (which I invariably forget) and vanishing whenever I see a helpful salesperson-type approaching. By this time, everybody else is buying, buying, buying. No wonder they don’t believe me when I say, “Just looking today, thank you.”
Finally, sometime between Dec. 10 and 15, I realize it’s time to get down to business. I shuffle my credit cards, put on my most sensible shoes, and march out the door.
The sensible shoes come in handy when I have to hike in from the nether regions of the parking lot. When I elbow my way in, finally, past not only all the people but all the fake reindeer, toy soldiers and other seasonal decorations, I hear Andy Williams warbling about snow on one store’s PA system and Willie Nelson doing his interpretation of “Jingle Bells” next door. “Hah!” I laugh to myself. “They’re so clever! They think that’s going to get me in the Christmas spirit! Well, it won’t work. I’m not so easily manipulated!”
Five minutes later, I’m out in the corridor, swinging my first shopping bag of the day and singing along with the piped-in Christmas carols. I still remember the words I learned in fourth grade:
We three kings of Orient are,
Tried to smoke a rubber cigar,
It was loaded, it explo-o-ded,
No-ow we live on Mars....
After that, my resistance is gone. Not only am I buying, I’m smiling at strangers, dropping wads of bills in the Salvation Army kettles and otherwise acting like Ebenezer Scrooge after all the Christmas ghosts had done their number on him. And I remember what he said when he woke up that Christmas morning: “Thank goodness I’m not too late.” Or something like that.