God Rest Ye Merry Mall Generation--and Flu Sufferers

Perhaps you’ve heard that Nordstrom offers a service where you just drop off your Christmas list and their helpers will pick out the presents, wrap them and even deliver them to the giftees. Now they just need to come up with a service where they will open your gifts and pretend to enjoy them for you. We could all rest a little easier then.

Today, though, I feel as if I have the collected works of Yoko Ono playing in my head. Even my hair aches. I have the flu, and it’s dang hard to feel much holiday cheer when you’ve got “A River Runs Through It” screening in your digestive tract.

Before collapsing in a whining mass on my bed, I did drag myself through the mall to try to force the consciousness on myself that it indeed is the holiday season. Some Christmases I feel like an impostor, just going through the proper holiday moves, the proper feeling having failed to ignite me. Acquiring that feeling seems to rely, sadly, on going through the bustling department stores, where the atmosphere is as heavy as Jupiter’s with the spray of perfume and cologne.

(The mall, of course, is where Santa is being held hostage these days. That’s right, your parents weren’t lying. There is a real Santa, and he’d be shimmying right down the chimney onto your gas logs if the retailers only would let him loose. It’s a living hell for Santa: Every time he tries to stand to get away, another kid lands in his lap with a list the size of a Norman tapestry.)

Aside from atmosphere, though, I’m not getting much from the malls this year. My family has decided to avoid the commercial cattle call and to go for a more traditional Christmas, just sharing one another’s good company and small homemade gifts.

It’s a charming notion, but it really isn’t a lot of fun. To most people of my generation a traditional Christmas is a consumer Christmas. It’s all we’ve ever known. I doubt that anyone’s old Uncle Sven is going to be able to whittle the interactive laser disc player most of us want.

Stan Freberg lampooned the commercialization of Christmas in 1958 with his “Green Christmas,” when all the meaning of the day was subverted by advertising executives. Today, no one even thinks twice about shelling out $71.48 for a motorized Santa that comes with a big Coca-Cola label permanently affixed.

Sears South Coast Plaza does have one of my favorite, though kind of depressing, gift buying areas: Its former garden department is now the weirdest book store I’ve ever seen. They have big shipping crates full of publishers’ overstock, and there are loads of current, quality paperbacks, including some first-rate literary adventures, available at 60% off list.

The depressing part is that, being that this is the former garden department, most of these books are outdoors. Between the elements and the rough handling they get as folks rummage through the crates, the books are getting slowly destroyed. It seems a sad commentary on the importance of literature in our society when Sears keeps its lawn mowers safely indoors and the books heaped outside. Another good rainstorm or two and I figure they might as well change the sign from “Huge Book Sale” to “Santa’s Papier-Mache Wonderland.”

All the traditional holiday characters seemed to be on hand at South Coast Plaza, namely the high-profile security staff. Maybe I didn’t seem quite the professional journalist when I approached them, since in my flu-bugged state I felt kind of like a beached jellyfish with a note pad. But none of them seemed willing to share any holiday insights.

At Toys “R” Us, meanwhile, a gray plastic assault gun called The Machine ($19.95) offers six violent, digitally produced selections. Along with the standard shotguns and machine gun fire, one of the settings sounds like a fanciful attempt to create the sound of human souls being torn from their broken bodies.

Even as the Reagan-Bush years draw to a close, the store’s War “B” Swell section is really booming, with “Streets of Rage” and “Contra III” video games, and “official police play equipment” including a little nightstick like the one popularized in the Rodney King video.

You can buy whole battlefields, such as the G.I. Joe Fort America, Battle Mountain and Fortress Assault, which, if purchased together, could so completely cover your floor with plastic carnage that you’d never need carpet or tile.

I wouldn’t buy this stuff for Idi Amin, much less a kid I had any regard for. But it seems a natural impulse to buy something at Christmas. The day is drawing nigh, and I have no idea what sort of crafts doohickeys I should be trying to make for gifts. In my present state, it won’t be much, unless I can form it out of the wad of used tissues I have immediately at hand. Maybe I can just pay Nordstrom to send someone by to make something homey for me.