The Perfect Present : 7 Southlanders Tell How They Find the Right Gifts <i> and </i> Stay Sane

You know the nightmares of holiday shopping as well as anyone:

* Nasty traffic snarls as you drive into, out of or anywhere near a mall.

* Endless waiting in line as you wonder whether your harried salesclerk might return one day or has suddenly bolted for the beach.

* Self-imposed threats to deprive yourself of the Neiman Marcus Last Call Sale if you resort to giving “The Clapper”--or McDonald’s gift certificates--again this year.

Many of us just accept this sort of hysteria accompanying the annual hunt for holiday gifts. In fact, not only do we accept it, we’ve turned it into a religion. We practice it together.

The basic ritual goes like this: First, we take a day off to give thanks that we have so much and consume far more food than we can comfortably digest. Then we take a second day off to buy more stuff for which we can be grateful. We roam the covered malls and outdoor plazas en masse for this sacred shopping feast. As a result, many retailers now claim the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year.

There are, however, a few souls who refuse to be sucked into the game. They have found salvation from this perennial retail madness.

You won’t find them complaining about how many whiny toddlers they had to listen to while spending two hours in the gift-wrap line. Their cars don’t stand a chance of disappearing into that Twilight Zone known as the parking structure.

What’s more, they will not return to work Monday suffering from Shoppers’ Arm (the painful condition caused by clutching too many packages tightly to the body for extended periods of time).

Amazingly, these folks will still get all their Christmas and Hanukkah shopping done--and have enough energy left to actually have fun during the holidays.

How do they perform this miracle?

How do they manage to enjoy the spirit that was intended to be celebrated during the final month of the year?

To find out, Hot to Shop interviewed seven creative, resourceful Southern Californians:

Estele Lopez, the businesswoman who runs Miracle on Broadway, which has revitalized Broadway downtown; Ed Krupp, the showman/scientist who serves as director of Griffith Observatory; DeWain Valentine, the internationally acclaimed sculptor and painter; Marlene Stewart, the costume designer who creates stage wardrobes for such performers as Madonna and Paula Abdul; Howard Bragman, the marketing and public relations consultant who frequently represents AIDS organizations; George Wallace, the stand-up comic who appears frequently on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and “The Tonight Show,” and Judy Chu, a Monterey Park city councilwoman and former mayor who is also a psychology professor.

As it turns out, they are all Ninja Shoppers of the first order. They knuckle down, make a plan and execute it--with martial-arts-style focus and finesse. Some of them enjoy shopping more than others and build that factor into their strategies. But none of them finds selecting and purchasing holiday gifts to be a grim ordeal they wouldn’t even wish on Uncle Scrooge.

One Gift Fits All

Marlene Stewart offers the simplest plan of attack. The woman who outfitted Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton in “Terminator 2” gives everyone on her list the same thing: trees planted in their names by TreePeople, the Studio City-based, nonprofit environmental organization. (TreePeople will plant a tree in someone’s name for $10 each, $50 for a grove of five or $100 for a grove of 10. The trees are planted in mountain areas surrounding Los Angeles.)

“I like to give gifts that make people’s lives better instead of fantasy toys,” Stewart says. “Everyone feels good about this gift and it will certainly help all of us in Los Angeles to feel better. Everybody already has enough toys for now, at least most of my friends do. This kind of gift is important to me. I wish I could be out there planting the trees myself.”

Part of Stewart’s one-gift-benefits-all philosophy is inspired by the fact that she shops for a living and doesn’t really like to do more of it during the holidays--especially when the stores are overrun with amateurs.

3 Ironclad Rules

Ed Krupp, who runs Griffith Observatory, traditionally observes three ironclad, time-crunching rules:

* “Don’t go to any mall on a weekend.”

* “Don’t go to any mall after dark.”

* “Don’t shop anywhere that requires you to park in a parking structure.”

As Krupp is well aware, malls are likely to be overrun with crowds on weekends and weeknights during December. Weekday mornings provide the best opportunities for at least a modicum of shopping serenity.

And by nixing parking structures, Krupp believes he’s pretty much eighty-sixed the possibility of that supreme shopping embarrassment: wandering rat-like, burdened with packages, from floor to floor in a concrete maze in search of a lost car.

But even with the rules, Krupp and his wife, Robin, manage not to do much holiday shopping in Los Angeles. They typically make many of their purchases throughout the year, usually while traveling in other countries.

“It seems to me that problem No. 1, of course, is the idea of finding the right thing for the right person. In my view, that usually means finding something unusual and special--not what they want,” says Krupp, one of the world’s leading scientists in the field of archeo-astronomy.

“The best way that we’ve found to deal with that is to do a lot of shopping when we’re out of the country, in some exotic corner of the world, like Guatemala or China or even darkest New Mexico.”

Even those on limited travel budgets can find similar opportunities in the ethnic shopping areas within Los Angeles such as Little Tokyo, Olvera Street and Chinatown. But Krupp has found that timing and attitude are the critical ingredients in avoiding shopping hassles:

“Since you’re buying things at different times of the year, it eliminates the pressure cooker race at the end of the year. And shopping while you’re traveling eliminates the crowds, the gridlock and the parking madness in Southern California. It doesn’t eliminate the crowds and all the other strange things you encounter in these other places, but, of course, you see those crowds and experiences as recreational.”

An Eye in the Storm

Estele Lopez, executive director of the Miracle on Broadway Corp., goes to work five days a week in what she calls “the city’s busiest shopping district. I’ve been told Broadway has the most pedestrian traffic on any street west of Chicago.”

For ambience, Lopez claims the place can’t be beat. “But I can’t handle that on my off hours,” she adds. “I need serenity. So for Christmas shopping, I run to Santa Barbara a lot. I love shopping there in the little shops on State Street. I also like Larchmont Village in Los Angeles.

“And one of the calmest places I’ve found is the Citicorp’s Seventh Market Place (downtown). You can go there on practically the day before Christmas and find no crowds. You are waited on by calm, courteous, unstressed salespeople. There’s no waiting to have your gifts wrapped. You can step outside and have a cappuccino . It’s a secret that not too many people have discovered.”

Not that Lopez has that much left to do on Dec. 24.

“It’s not unusual for me to start Christmas shopping in August or September. I feel the preparation for Christmas shouldn’t just be in terms of credit cards and shopping time,” she says. “For me, it has more to do with the spirituality, what you’re getting prepared for. I like to begin early, so I have the time and the unstressed mind to think about the people I want to remember at that very special time of the year.”

An Early Start

DeWain Valentine, the Venice-based sculptor/painter whose works are known for their near-mystical use of light, is a down-to-earth shopper. He loves to hit the malls and he typically starts working on his Christmas list Dec 26. “Or whenever the sales start,” he says. “I like to get ahead of the game and that’s when they have great sales.”

Valentine and his wife, Jina, do a lot of traveling throughout the year and pick up gifts on their assorted journeys, which this year included trips to Europe, New York and Hawaii, where they also live part time.

“When I’m shopping, I actually prefer malls. We go to them, but it’s usually when we’re out of town. That’s the only time I have time,” says the artist, who also enjoys shopping from catalogues.

But whatever the source, he always observes this rule: “When you see it, get it.”

He also believes that one carefully chosen gift can easily work for lots of people: “We usually do a big collection of nice bottles of wine and bag them up and pass them out at the door during the holidays. It seems everybody we know is into wine and eating too much.”

Valentine’s best gifts, though, the type he prefers to receive, are hand-crafted and reserved for the family: “I usually give my mother and other family members artwork. My two younger sons are both painters and they tell me specifically which things they want, but sometimes I surprise them. I give them pieces from a specific series so there’s no quarreling about who got the better present.”

Catalogue Junkie

Howard Bragman represented Spiegel Catalogue early in his marketing/public relations career. “We always did these stories about how you can shop by catalogue and do all your Christmas and Hanukkah shopping in front of the TV set in one evening, make your phone calls and be done with it. I actually tried it one year and it worked,” says the Los Angeles-based PR man.

Today, he’s expanded the range of catalogues from which he shops and claims they’re “so wild and varied nowadays you can find something great for just about anybody.”

Corporate gifts, however, are more challenging. In its first year of business, Bragman & Company sent out small, leather pocket calendars. “The reaction was a universal yawn. In this town, everybody has Filofaxes and calendars are more personal than your underwear,” Bragman reports.

Last year, he says, the firm was more successful with a contribution to TreePeople, announced by a small tin can with a custom-designed label: “Peas on Earth.” Inside the can was a small rubber ball resembling the Earth packed in dried peas.

“Some people liked it so much they wouldn’t even open the can and see what was inside,” he recalls. The only problem with clever corporate gifts, Bragman acknowledges, is “you’re expected to top yourself every year.” He can’t say what’s being sent out this year, but hints that recent events and the fact that he represents a number of AIDS organizations will be taken into consideration.

“There’s even dissent within our agency this year, but I think this year’s gift will be within the bounds of what’s acceptable,” he predicts. “But many of our mainstream clients will just get a polite card.”

One-Stop Shopping

Judy Chu, a Monterey Park city councilwoman and former mayor, uses two streamlined methods for dealing with holiday shopping.

The first involves stacking a pile of catalogues next to her bed and reserving them for reading while she watches “The Tonight Show.”

“My favorite time for shopping is about 11:30 at night. I have this memory association: Johnny Carson, catalogues. Johnny Carson, catalogues. The best companies to get gifts from are the ones with 24-hour order lines,” says the psychology professor at East Los Angeles College.

Chu’s second strategy is to choose a single store from which to purchase things not found in catalogues. That way, she figures, she only has to shop in one small portion of a mall rather than the whole thing.

“So one year it might be a Nordstrom year. Another year it might be a Sharper Image year. Another year it might be a leather year,” she says. “This year Monterey Park is celebrating its 75th anniversary, so it’s a ‘75th-anniversary-of-Monterey-Park year.’ We have a lot of memorabilia: watches, books, T-shirts.”

But whatever year it is, Chu arranges it so that she won’t get stuck spending much time on gift wrapping: “A lot of catalogues will wrap things for you. And stores such as Nordstrom and the Sharper Image do complimentary gift wrap. I usually wind up with only one or two gifts I have to wrap.”

Off-Season Star

George Wallace--not the former Alabama governor, but the stand-up comic--always starts his holiday shopping at least a year ahead to take advantage of sales.

As he explains: “I like to shop the half-off-the-half-off sales. I buy jewelry and all that stuff. Like last year, I bought some $500 jewelry that was on sale for $250 and I got it for $50, but I leave the $250 price tag on it. I buy the stuff, then I get my boxes from Neiman Marcus and hope they don’t take it back.”

One reason Wallace likes to shop early is that he has no patience for marketers who appeal to consumers only during the holidays.

“Certain words pop up at Christmas out of nowhere. The word Isotoner. You never hear that word in July and August. If you look it up in the dictionary, it says ‘word only used at Christmastime.’ Same thing with Hickory Farm stores. They just pop out of nowhere,” says the comic, whose television series “A Night at the Club with George Wallace” will be syndicated in January.

He offers this advice to women shoppers everywhere: “I want to speak on behalf of all the men. We have enough cologne. No more cologne, please. You know, there’s something about an Aqua Velva Man--we know he shops at K mart.”