Museums Offer Inspired Holiday Shopping Alternatives

Why wouldn’t people get holiday depression?

This time of year, conventional shopping is as much fun as gum surgery.

Even Mother Teresa might have resorted to rude hand gestures if she had had to drive around a mall parking structure six or seven times. It’s hard to be saintly when you’re stuck behind a stopped car, waiting for another car to exit a parking space more precious than the combined gifts of the Magi.

Some people avoid this annual horror by shopping catalogs. Others avoid it by combining their obligatory shopping with a trip to a local museum or other institution, such as the Los Angeles County Zoo.

Museum members typically get a 10% discount at these shops, which tend to be oases of calm, with sales people still capable of smiling and saying “Thank you” as if they mean it.

I discovered this strategy years ago and perfected it while covering the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries. The tar pits museum has a terrific gift shop, especially for people shopping for animal-obsessed little ones (they even stock dinosaur items, even though dinosaurs were never found in the area, because they know kids mainline them).

The Page Museum once carried a glorious European-made Christmas tree ornament in the shape of a giant ground sloth, one of the Ice Age mammals whose bones were found in the tar pits. What was I thinking when I let that one get away?

The museum shopper makes the shrewd decision that there is something here for everyone on his or her list--that it is not necessary to sift through the thousands of options in the toy warehouses to find something apt.

One such efficient buyer is Sally May, who recently popped into Audrey’s, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Sepulveda Pass, to do some Hanukkah shopping.

A Culver City resident, May was looking for something unusual, and unquestionably found it.

“I bought car mezuzas for my two sons and my brother,” she explained.

It’s the custom among Orthodox Jews, and many non-Orthodox as well, to put a mezuza in the doorway of the family home (the Hebrew word means doorway). The mezuza is a small container for a little roll of parchment inscribed with verses from Deuteronomy, including the Jewish declaration of faith, the Shema Yisrael.

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Actually, a car mezuza just looks like a mezuza--inside there’s some sort of traveler’s prayer that has no traditional resonance. But this novelty item, as an Audrey’s clerk described it, is a hot seller at $14, snapped up by people like May who worry about their relatives on the road, especially the ones who drive trucks.

Debra Berenson was also shopping for Hanukkah, the eight-day festival of lights that starts Sunday at sundown.

Berenson, an actress who lives in Santa Monica, helped her 8-year-old, Ariana, pick out a book that tells the story of Hanukkah, which commemorates the triumph of the Jewish Maccabees over their Syrian oppressors in the 2nd century BC. Ariana also found a Sabbath-themed puzzle place mat to color.

Berenson said she and her family have always celebrated Hanukkah and resisted the culture-wide Christmas blitz. She is from Utah, she said, where relatives were sometimes under unwelcome pressure to convert to Christianity.

“I don’t mind if people are into Christmas as long as they’re not proselytizing to me,” she explained.

Audrey’s carries dozens of different kinds of dreidels--tops used in a traditional Hanukkah game--now a popular Jewish collectible. It also stocks a wide range of menorahs, or Hanukkah candelabra, including one in which Statues of Liberty hold up the candles and another featuring Disney characters.

Berenson was not in the market. Everybody in the family already has at least one menorah.

“My husband has his from college. I’ve got my grandmother’s. We have one for the children, which is a Noah’s ark. A few years ago we bought one that looks like a tree of life--it’s gorgeous. We even have a menorah for traveling. It’s tiny, and you can use birthday candles.”

At the other end of the Valley, in Griffith Park, Paul Pfau had found shopping serenity at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage.

Pfau, who lives in Shadow Hills, has two jobs--he is a trial attorney and he also runs Mt. Everest climbs.

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“I come every year, and birthdays in between,” he said of the Autry shop, which carries everything from a Hopalong Cassidy cookie jar to an armadillo hand puppet and a barbed wire sign that warns “GET OUT” (it sells better than the “WELCOME” version, a staffer said). A tape of Native American-inspired Christmas music played, as Pfau walked past a display of fanciful wooden animals from Oaxaca.

“The Gene Autry Museum is the place you go for gifts that take you outside the city and up to that high blue sky country,” Pfau said, as lyrically as any cowboy poet.

His gift finds included a blue tin cup filled with Tin Cup-brand coffee, attractively packaged chiles and a clutch of Western-themed calendars.

“You gotta hit all the senses,” he explained. “You gotta get the chiles for your mouth and the calendars for your imagination and there’s bound to be some sage around here.”

Managers of shops like Audrey’s and the Autry Museum’s are trying to raise their profiles as shopping venues in their own right. You don’t have to pay museum admission to browse either one. And you can even spend up to 30 minutes at the zoo’s shop without buying a ticket. Just ask and be prepared to turn over your I.D.