I started my Christmas shopping, and I’m hitting a dead end already. First off, if you are starting your Christmas shopping November 1st, then you are starting late. Anyone with half a brain knows you should start June 1st, because it takes 7 months to pick out the perfect blender and necktie to give someone. I am forever cursed to be linked to this family of mine that is so difficult to shop for. It isn’t that we don’t know what we want for presents, it’s the simple fact that we are so impulsive that anything we want, we usually go out and buy it for ourselves. In essence, we are a bunch of children. “I can’t wait till Christmas, I WANT IT NOW!!!” And I’m sure there is a private temper tantrum somewhere in that inner monologue as well, but I won’t even attempt to decipher that one today.
But I did something this year that I’m not sure how I feel about it. One Christmas present given this year will have come from….yes, Aco. I have joined the legion of people who have inadvertently found a nice (and affordable) Christmas present at the hardware store. I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the subject of hardware stores though, my dad always asks for the same thing (both Christmas and Birthday) and that is a Home Depot gift card. Many of you who know me are aware that I work for ACO Hardware, and Home Depot is to ACO as what the Soviet Union was to the United States for about 60 years. And yet he continuously asks me for a Home Depot gift card every single year. Finally I just told him “Why don’t you ask me to quit my job for Christmas?” He thought it was funny. We’ll see who’s laughing when he get’s a coffee mug with a polar bear on it this year. (Sidenote: I did not buy him a coffee mug with a polar bear on it. As a kid, I completely exhausted the coffee mug as a present avenue, and he has enough coffee mugs to begin a side business of selling coffee mugs on Craigslist)
It turns out Dan Wise and myself both want the same thing from each other for Christmas, so I just suggested that we each buy it for ourselves right now and just cancel each other out. There’s that great impulsiveness again. I like to do my shopping early (and online usually) because people Christmas shopping are absolute barbarians. There is no bigger example of the decline of society than to see how people act while Christmas shopping. Since when was it acceptable to just toss items you no longer want on the floor? You can be walking through the mall, pass a little old lady, she’ll smile at you, you smile back and keep walking. But if you turn around, odds are you’ll catch that sweet little old lady sucker punching another little old lady to get her hands on a Jack LeLaine’s Juicer. Vicious.
And all this crap they are fighting over, these so-called presents? The people you are giving them to absolutely hate them! After all that fighting, half of it’ll probably end up being returned December 26th.
“What can I do for you?”
“I want to return this tea pot shaped like Felix the Cat”
“Any reason?”
“Yeah, it’s a teapot shaped like Felix the Cat”
Christmas didn’t used to be all about shopping. What happened to the Christmas I remember? Christmas was a great tradition where everyone got together as a family. The kids opened presents while the adults got slowly hammered and worked up enough courage to confront someone about ‘what a complete asshole they’ve been this last year’ (Note: If they didn’t work their courage up then, they would have a second venue to do so on New Years Eve). That’s the traditions I remember, good wholesome drunk American family values.
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