shopping

I finished my Christmas shopping yesterday.

(Yes, I know. I know, there was a whole chunk of the traditional Friday f-off thread at Emily's place devoted to the retailers promoting the prematurity of the Christmas season. But. My parents, who host the traditional family Christmas gathering, are coming to visit me for Thanksgiving next week, and if I can hand off all the gifts I've bought to them, I will neither have to ship them [and trust USPS or UPS not to lose them or steal them] nor will I have to try to find room in my suitcase for them when I travel at Christmas).

Anyway. There's another reason I shop early, and it's not because I secretly refer to Black Friday as "Amateur's Night" (the way some drinking folks refer to either New Year's Eve or St. Patrick's Day).

It's because I loathe crowds. And I loathe Christmas crowds most of all.

I have two hypotheses about shoppers.

Hypothesis one: in any public grouping of people, 5% will indulge in moderately annoying behavior, and another 5% will indulge in extremely annoying behavior.

So, if I go to a store and find that there are only 20 people shopping there, the law of averages says one will be the moderately annoying type and one will be the very annoying type. And they will be easy enough to ignore.

But, once you get to a store that has 200 shoppers crammed in it, you get 10 of the moderately annoying ones and 10 of the very annoying ones.

And that brings me to hypothesis two: when people witness bad behavior in public, they are more likely to indulge in it themselves. I do not know if it's a "hey, he's getting away with it, so anything goes!" or a "I am going to get mean too, in self defense, so I don't get trampled" or a "he's making me mad and so I'm just going to treat everyone else as badly as he does" reaction. But it seems that if you drop one rude person down in an otherwise well-behaved crowd, the whole crowd gets meaner.

But anyway. I saw a fair enough amount of bad behavior yesterday to make me thankful that I am done with the malls now until perhaps February.

One particular incident: I wanted to buy a pair of gloves for my mother as part of her present. I found the right pair of gloves, on sale, picked out the color I thought she would want, and went to get in line. And I got behind this woman. She had about $400 of random stuff (and this was an "upscale discount" type department store, if that makes sense). And she had coupons, which apparently come out of a paper I do not get. And she kept ordering the poor girl working the cash register what items went with what coupon. But - she was TOTALLY WRONG. She didn't really know what coupons were valid on her items. I don't know if she was just one of those people who lives in an alternate universe, or if she was deliberately trying to snow the cashier, but the young lady working the cash register kept saying, "No, ma'am, I'm sorry. That item is already marked down 50% and I am not permitted to take your 15% off coupon for it." And so on. And the woman kept getting all huffy, and at one point stomped off to find the sign from one of the departments where she had picked something up to bring it back to "prove" that her fantasy about the coupons was right.

(Apparently she never found it because she came back empty handed and grumbled as the checkout person rang up the rest of her order).

And I stood there, with like a $12 pair of gloves in my hands, and thought how nice it must be to feel so entitled because you are spending so very much money that you can order someone around. Not that I would, my mom raised me too well to act like that. But if i were offered some perks now and then, I'd say "thank you" and take them. Like for example, I would have appreciated it if the checkout girl had rung up my $12 gloves while the fuming woman was off looking for her sign. I didn't say anything because I could tell that the checkout girl was already having a bad day - after the woman paid and left I made some remark about the coupons, and she kind of rolled her eyes and said, "That's why I read the advertisements thoroughly every morning before I come on the floor, so I know what coupons work for what things."

I also saw a grandma and grandson walking into the target. Grandson was probably 7 or 8 and almost perfectly round. Grandma was walking at a snail's pace with him - I mean, a slow amble for me was about four times as fast as they were going - and as I passed them, I heard her say, "Honey, I am walking as slowly as I possibly can! I cannot go any slower!" Now, barring some kind of health problem (and if he had one that bad, he should have been in a wheelchair or something), probably the correct response to such a kid would be "No, you need to move faster. You are young; pick up the pace."

Later I saw them in the toy section; he was standing in the cart. (I think my mom made me stop riding in the cart at the store when I was about 4.) And he was begging for a toy.

Now, call me old-fashioned or mean, but - it's like a month until Christmas. If my brother or I had even thought to beg for a toy at this time, our parents would have reminded us of Santa (or, when we were older, of all the gifts we were going to get from family) and that we should be happy with what we have now.

I also saw another family with a small girl having a complete meltdown because she was not getting a toy.

I do not remember such behavior as being so common when I was a child. And had I indulged in it, I would have been (a) forcibly removed from the store by my parent and (b) subject to fairly unpleasant punishment when I got home.

But anyway. I wonder at people's public behavior - the woman throwing a fit over the fact that the ugly purse she is buying that is already marked down to $20 will not be marked down a further $5 for her because it doesn't fit the established Rule of Coupons, the little boy who practically sits down in the middle of a parking lot because his grandma isn't walking slow enough for him, the kid throwing a tantrum in the middle of the Target - and I kind of ask myself if the little boy in the parking lot or the little girl in the Target maybe grow up to be people like the purse lady? And what their parents could do to stop that from happening? I suppose some of it would fall into the "get over needing to have your CHILD see you as a 'friend' rather than a PARENT" concept.

And another reason why I don't like shopping during the "true" Christmas season is that lots of miserable human behavior comes out that sucks away my enthusiasm for the season. The person who complains loudly about "having" to buy a gift for a relative they really don't like. The person who is buying some useless and ugly but expensive and therefore "impressive" gift for someone for whom Christmas has become a feast of competition and one-upmanship rather than a feast of love. The people who try to game the coupon/discount/sale system, resorting to shady tactics, so they can get a gift that was originally marginally more expensive than what they might have otherwise bought. The kids who sit down in the toy aisle and wail because it's another two whole weeks until Christmas and they can't see why they can't have the toy they want NOW.

All of that kind of behavior makes me feel kind of ill. And it kind of makes me see the point of the people - and these are people from all ends of the spectrum, from real lefties to deeply religiously conservative types - who say we should not give gifts at Christmas. Or that we should only give things we can make ourselves (although that puts people who don't have a lot of skills in sewing or woodworking or writing or photography in a difficult situation). Or that we should give money to charity and instead give a description of what we gave money for to the people we love. Because I hate seeing getting gifts for people reduced to some hateful chore, to money that is spent grudgingly, to a competition to impress people.

Or, heck, I don't know - that we take all the money as a family or group of friends or whatever we'd spend, and pool it, and go rent a ski cabin somewhere and spend Christmas week on the slopes. I don't ski but that sounds preferable to me to spending the month of December listening to people bitch about their relatives when you KNOW they will meet them at the door with big fake smiles come Dec. 24.

I know I'm being hopelessly idealistic about this, but I tend to think about it this way - if you really hate being involved in a gift exchange, don't do it. Don't give a gift. If you're really as uncomfortable with this unpleasant person as you claim, just take the risk of them cutting ties with you. Just tell them you're cutting back. Or you feel like you have enough stuff. Or intimate that you're having money trouble (if your relatives are really as catty as all that, they will enjoy spreading what is probably false gossip about you as much as any pair of Isotoner gloves or "executive gold-plated golf tees")

For that matter, if you have to get SOMETHING, get a gift card. Go to Best Buy or Macy's or some restaurant and plunk down $20 or $50 or whatever, and get a little card. Yeah, they're kind of cold and sterile and not that much fun at the time, but it sure beats trolling through the mall complaining about how you can't STAND Aunt Jane and you don't see WHY you keep buying her a gift year after year, and making all the people around you - the people who actually LOVE their relatives and want to find a gift for them they will enjoy (as opposed to merely being impressed by) - miserable.

Or, go on a cruise. Just give in to all the selfishness you've stuffed down deep in your soul. Yes, I know. You resent buying gifts because people NEVER appreciate them (or you) enough. You'd like to have all that money back at the end of Christmas day, when your nephews have already declared that the game you gave them is "boring," and your uncle already has the book you bought him, and your sister in law reminds you that jewelry with "even a trace of nickel" in it gives her rashes. So just cut your losses - spend all that money on yourself. Sure, it will make your family angry, and you might feel guilty. But it's sure a lot better than ruining the Christmas season for the rest of us, with your heavy sighs and your eye-rolling, and your baleful conversation at work about how few days there are left until the holiday and how you're just NEVER find anything for your mother because she is so picky.

I don't know. A lot of the "simplicity" articles in magazines talk about destressing the holidays by only doing the things you really like. So - if you really hate the gift thing that much, don't do it. Oh, it will probably mean some unhappy people this year, and probably fewer gifts for you next year (and if you aren't a total hypocrite, you will accept this with resignation). But if it's so horrible for you that all you can do is complain about it, give the rest of us a rest.

Me? I like Christmas. I like getting presents for my family. True, I don't have any real nutcases in my family - or at least in my immediate family, and the more distant difficult people are easily enough plied with a big box from some kind of gourmet-food mailorder company. And so, it irritates me to hear people go on and on about how they "hate" shopping for such-and-such a relative. Again, I say: gift cards. Yeah, they're ugly and they say "I spent NO time on you this year" but at least it's over fast, and I don't have to hear you dither about what item to buy.

My problem is that I tend to keep finding things I'd like to buy for my family; I've had to resort to doing all my in-person Christmas shopping on a cash-only basis so I don't wind up buying 18 things for each person.