Christmas Shopping

I have most­ly com­plet­ed my Christ­mas shop­ping for this year. All I have left to buy are stock­ing stuffers and some ran­dom stuff for the per­son at work for whom I am a Secret San­ta. I’m real­ly in the Christ­mas spir­it this year. I feel that I have a firmer grip on my life than I have ever had pre­vi­ous­ly. It is a nice feel­ing.

I still hate going shop­ping though. I spent three hours yes­ter­day run­ning around and buy­ing what need­ed to be bought while juk­ing and stiff-arm­ing high school mall­rats and lit­tle old ladies who take up the whole aisle look­ing at a cheese log. I swear, peo­ple don’t know how to be con­sci­en­tious shop­pers, they all think they own the whole store.

I’m not too con­cerned with the whole “mate­ri­al­is­tic hol­i­day” meme that floats around every year’s end. Gift-giv­ing does­n’t oper­ate only in some con­sumer cap­i­tal­ist mode. It is nice to be able to pro­vide for oth­ers. My mom has had a good idea for the past sev­er­al years, instead of our fam­i­ly buy­ing gifts for each oth­er, we should all donate the mon­ey to a char­i­ty in their name. Now, I like get­ting gifts equal­ly as much as giv­ing them but I admit, I can prob­a­bly live with­out every­thing I get for Christ­mas, and giv­ing to char­i­ty would be a tru­ly good thing to do. Even if we did that how­ev­er, I’m sure we’d still end up buy­ing stuff for each oth­er though.