'Tis the Season

From the time I outgrew the kiddie seat in the shopping cart, I have loved to shop. Clothes, jewelry, home décor and garden goodies are my biggest cravings. I LOVE clothes. If I won the lottery, I would have to buy a house just to store all the clothes (and shoes) I would stockpile. It’s a good thing I don’t look like Cindy Crawford, or I would have gone broke years ago draping myself in designer finery. Luckily, my short, slightly dumpy figure doesn’t really lend itself to "haute couture." And after spending a score of years treading concrete floors for ten or twelve-hour shifts, my feet are too persnickety to tolerate much in the way of fancy shoes. But that doesn’t mean that the quest for the perfect outfit or pair of shoes hasn’t become a favorite pass-time! I crave fine, "petable" materials—like satin, fleece, and velvet (you can keep your scratchy old wool or cotton sweaters. Give me acrylic—soft, colorfast, and wash and wear.) I love silver, gold, or anything that catches light and turns it into a shower of sparkles, whether on fabric, around my neck, or on my fingers (or feet!) Try and make me walk past a jewelry store window without stopping, goo-goo eyed, hypnotized by the "pretties" in the case.

When I was in junior high, there was only one indoor shopping mall in the whole of the Chicago area--a quirky little oddity with two anchor stores and maybe a dozen smaller shops in between. By the time I graduated high school, there were at least half a dozen malls, large and small, within a half-hour drive in any direction. (Twenty-first century retail philosophy has turned the malls—the ones that are still standing—into dinosaurs. "Big box’ stores like Old Navy, Linens ‘n’ Things, and Barnes and Noble, and huge "outlet store" centers, are the present fad. And the newest thing is these trendy little "shopping villages," or whatever you want to call them. Little groupings of high-end stores cunningly arranged to look like the downtown of some quaint hamlet of a bygone era. Long on charm and short on parking. And you have to walk outside to go from store to store. Excuse me, but in the Pacific Northwest in the middle of a sodden winter, I don’t find that particularly charming.)

Of course, being the "mall groupie" I am, Christmas was always the crown jewel of the calendar year. It’s like the shoppers’ Boston marathon. All the shopping you do the rest of the year is merely training for this one event. Or, it used to be. I’m middle-aged and childless. By my age, most women have shopping lists that have grown exponentially with the numbers of their progeny. If Christmas is for children, it doesn’t have much relevance for me in that respect. And we’ve been doing the "draw a name" thing with my sisters and their husbands for years, so there’s no help there. (On Thanksgiving, we put everyone’s name in a bowl, each person draws a name, and that’s who you buy for. The result is that each person is charged with buying a gift for a fifty-ish sister or brother-in-law who basically already has everything.) And, between my husband and me, holiday shopping has been distilled to which expensive home improvement we are going to embark upon this year, and call it our "Christmas present" to each other. Eminently practical, but utterly devoid of magic. Bleah!

So what’s a shopping junkie to do with herself of a Christmastide, when there’s no shopping to be done? It’s really pretty funny. I have to literally tear myself away, with a big sigh and eyes nearly welling with tears, from displays of shiny Christmas wrap, fancy ribbons and packaging gewgaws. "Now, you don’t use those, anymore, dear. You know buying them would just be a waste of money…" (Not to mention I have stacks of the stuff left over from decades ago, when I actually did still buy and wrap gifts.) That rules out a second aspect of "The (Retail) Magic of Christmas."

Still, I can’t not shop. So, I see a new pattern emerging. Christmas ornaments. I love them. I can’t have enough of them. I already have so many that I would need a twenty-foot tree to accommodate them all. And since I don’t have a twenty-foot ceiling in any room in my house, I have solved that problem by simply adding Christmas trees. Two years ago, we inaugurated the "bedroom Christmas tree." This year, in the family room, where I have been making do with a little three-foot table-top model, we are upgrading to a full-size (albeit "slim profile") artificial fir. I’m even thinking of getting a couple of those pre-lit "corner" trees…one for either side of our new glass door in the dining room. Over the top? Absolutely. But until I can drag myself to a twelve-step-program for shop-a-holics, I have to channel thatretail addiction somewhere. And it’s CHRISTMAS! "It’s only once a year, Mr. Scrooge…!"