Up until Sunday, I had made it a point to avoid the mall at all costs.
The problem is not the commercialization of Christmas. I love the commercialization of Christmas. The sooner I see tree ornaments on the shelves and snowman sweaters on the racks, the better. I wouldn’t mind if they – and when I say “they” I mean the corporate stewards of the holiday spirit – started rolling out the Christmas junk in June. And sell it to me 24 hours a day, seven days a week, will you? Make some poor little foreign girl work long hours for little pay to assemble it for me, and while she’s at it, make sure she slaps on a couple of coats of lead-based paint.
No, what I dislike about the mall and Wal-Mart at Christmas time is the people who drive there, park there and shop there. Most of them shouldn’t be allowed out of their cages, let alone have driver’s licenses and major credit cards. But thanks to the Founding Fathers, every citizen has the right to pile up debt and park over the line, and they all showed up at the mall on Sunday.
My wife and I did most of our shopping online this year, so Sunday’s excursion was just going to be a quick trip to get a few things for my extended family. We tried to do as much advance prep as we could. We had shopping lists, a budget, and an entrance and exit strategy that was more George H.W. Bush than George W. Bush.
We packed up the baby and headed to Haywood Mall prepared to do some serious guerilla shopping. We made it past the first line of attacks on Haywood Road and were jockeying for position in the Macy’s parking lot when the 14-month-old in the backseat started regurgitating what seemed like every meal she’s had since Thanksgiving. As I tailed a couple of teen-agers heading towards their daddy’s SUV, the baby’s mother decided we should just turn around and go home.
It was a Christmas miracle.
I was fully prepared to just go home and spend some quality time with my family, but the shopping still needed to be done, so after garden hosing the baby’s car seat, I was redeployed to The Shops at Greenridge, which if you haven’t been, is the Afghanistan to Haywood Mall’s Iraq.
I made it into the Barnes & Noble there to look for a couple of nice books for my parents. I strolled over to the politics section and discovered some fan of lunatic conservative fiction had taken the time to cover up anything with a liberal bent with books by Ann Coulter and some cheaply thrown together biography of Mitt Romney. That kind of partisanship at Christmas really upset me.
Who does that type of thing?
“I do,” my wife told me when I got home. “I always turn Ann Coulter’s books around. I can’t stand to look at her face.”
Then there’s the story about me paying to see another man’s light display in Mauldin.
I managed to string together about 75 lights across garage, with a solid 64 of them in actual working order, while this guy in Mauldin creates a bona fide tourist attraction. You might as well remove all of the testosterone-producing nodes from my body. There were thousands and thousands of pretty twinkling lights to distract my baby from getting sick again, but I was most amazed by the sight the man’s power meter (you know what I mean). It was spinning faster than Mike Huckabee caught in the devil’s doughnut shop.
Besides that, it’s been a pretty lousy holiday season so far. I think maybe the contentiousness of the upcoming Presidential primaries is starting to creep into my Christmas spirit. It’s a good thing we’re going to spend Christmas with my family in Iowa this year.
I think it will do me good to sit down and enjoy the holidays with my Republican relatives. They buy the best presents.
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