The Holiday Frenzy Season is Here

So Halloween is over and November has begun. And so has the Christmas music, and the holiday television and radio ads. It’s like they’re telling us, Hurry up, people, you’re running behind. GO. SHOPPING. NOW!

Yuck.

I didn’t want Halloween to end because I knew the holiday frenzy would begin immediately thereafter. I’m surprised I’m not feeling pressured to put up our Christmas tree already.

Over the years I have been known to shop for Christmas gifts throughout the year so as not to become immersed too heavily in the holiday shopping madness, but this year has been different. I haven’t purchased that first gift, card, bow or stamp, although my little mind has been churning through ideas and possibilities. Of course, until I start an actual list, the “process” cannot truly begin.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy the whole holiday season. I do. It’s just that there’s way too much hype about it.

And, heck, the poor Thanksgiving holiday gets lost in the process.

I suppose turkeys everywhere would rejoice at this news, except that somehow, some way turkeys still manages to get purchased at grocery stores everywhere by the fourth Thursday in November. Sure, we have to push aside the Christmas hams to search for the perfect turkey to feed 18 people and we are forced to listen to that incessant canned Christmas music piped through the loudspeakers while having an internal debate over serving yams or mashed potatoes or both this year. It’s distracting, I tell you.

Okay, that whole paragraph is a lie. For me, anyway. 1) I’ve never prepared a turkey for 18 people. I’ve never even prepared a turkey for two people. I’m not crazy about turkey. 2) We don’t have ham for Christmas. 3) Yams, while healthier than your standard mashed potato, are orange. And I don’t eat orange food. And, yes, that pretty much involves all orange food, including pumpkin pie. And orange Skittles. You have to throw away orange Skittles.

Uh oh. After careful review of the multitudes of orange-colored foods out there, it occurs to me that I DO eat carrots. Oops. Lied again.

The only thing about that paragraph that was true (for me, anyway), is that we DO have to listen to canned Christmas music over the loudspeakers at the grocery store before we’ve even experienced the happy Thanksgiving holiday.

Of course, what sort of music could they possibly play to celebrate Thanksgiving? I think we only have “Over the River and Through The Woods.” And wouldn’t that get old really fast? Horse-driven sleighs are, after all, a rather outdated mode of transportation these days. And nobody has written any new songs about heading to grandma’s in a Kia, for example. Even after all these years. Go figure, huh? Probably there isn’t a big market for hit Thanksgiving songs.

The other reason the Thanksgiving holiday gets the short shrift is that shoppers everywhere have to gear up for the craziness that is Black Friday. The cooks in the family have to arise at the crack of dawn on Thanksgiving Day to prepare the meal that their family is required to eat at 10AM. And the shoppers in the family avoid turkey entirely at Thanksgiving dinner because it contains L-tryptophan and they don’t want to be sleepy and miss their 9PM alarm. (And by “shoppers,” of course, I mean “women.” Men spend Thanksgiving watching football and drinking beer and eating leftover turkey sandwiches. They think the shoppers in the family are crazy to go shopping at 1 o’clock in the morning.

I blame the retail industry. Over the years, stores have competed for our holiday dollars by opening earlier and earlier the day after Thanksgiving. It started out that stores opened at 6AM on Black Friday. Then other stores started opening at 5AM. And it continued on until now you see store managers, with napkins still tucked under their chins holding plates filled with turkey and stuffing and marshmallow-y yams in one hand while they unlock the store doors with the other.

Shoppers, meanwhile, have been congregating outside the store in the cold for hours. Eventually they start pushing and shoving each other to get the prime entry positions. You’d think the store was giving away pure gold bars or something.

The closer time gets to store opening, shoppers assume the typical bull stampede stance. This includes snorting to intimidate the other shoppers and stamping and pawing the ground in anticipation so as soon as the doors open, they can rush inside to buy Tattoo Barbie or the newest Wii game before the other shoppers can get their grubby hands on the goods.

And you know what happens as soon as the doors open, don’t you? The slower-moving store managers who can’t step aside fast enough don’t make it. All that is left after the crowd has surged inside is a little smear of yam on the floor. And the napkin. That’s it.

It’s very risky to be a store manager in charge of the keys to the door on Black Friday. I hope they get combat pay.

Thus far, I have avoided joining in on the Black Friday madness. I feel sorry for the dear departed store managers for one thing. And, for another, there is no toy, sweater or iPod worth getting up for in the middle of the night. Not even if they gave it to me free.

So I say, RELAX, PEOPLE! You’ve got plenty of time. But probably you should think about putting up your tree this weekend. Unless, of course, you never took it down after last Christmas. Then you’re good. Instead, you can spend the weekend picking the orange Skittles out of your kids’ stash of Halloween candy. And maybe think about writing a Thanksgiving song with the word "Kia" in it.

Thanksgiving is Over. Now on to Christmas!

It’s 9:15AM on Black Friday and there are probably scads of people whose day began more than 7 hours ago. If so, I hope you snagged all got those great bargains and deals that I couldn’t possibly hope to get if I were to walk into Target or Best Buy at a far more reasonable time of, oh, say, noon-ish.

But that’s okay – you can gloat if you want. I imagine anyone who is dedicated enough to set their alarm early enough to be at a store’s 3AM opening on Black Friday deserves their moment of glory.

Meanwhile I was snug in my bed struggling to breathe.

Yep, caught another cold. Seems like I JUST got over one, although if I actually check the calendar, it was over seven months ago. It doesn’t matter, colds make me miserable and they seem like they drag on endlessly.

I am now of the opinion, by the way, that Vitamin C and Airborne and all that other stuff you take as a preventative measure is just a bunch of hooey.

For a couple months now Vince and I have been taking a Vitamin C tablet both in the morning and at bedtime in the hopes that there will be some super-strong invisible Vitamin C shield protecting us from every tiny germ sprayed by some errant passerby who didn’t cover his mouth when he sneezed.

So either the sneezer had some super-strong germs, or my Vitamin C shield has a hole in it.

So I sit here with a box of Kleenex perpetually attached to my fingertips (which makes it a little hard to type), and I sneeze and cough and whine a lot about how lousy I feel.

Fortunately, the Day-Quil and Ny-Quil seem to be doing the trick and I’ve been able to sleep mostly through the night and am not too bad during the day…so perhaps my invisible Vitamin C shield is struggling to cover me – just a little bit.

Ah well. One cannot whine too much about one’s cold. (Well, one could – but people really don’t want to hear all the details), so I’ll have to move on to something else.

Like how I feel this incredible urge to hurry up and get the place decorated for the holidays – pronto. With radio stations like Sunny 95 already playing Christmas music and this Black Friday business and holiday decorations and Christmas lights already out on front lawns and strung up over garages, well, I’m feeling a little behind the times.

A friend of ours from Denmark remarked that Americans are funny because we’re in such a rush to get our Christmas decorations and trees up. She said that they do not put up their Christmas tree until December 24th…and by January 1st, it is gone. This is because they only use real trees. Artificial trees do not signify Christmas to our Danish friend.

Well, I can understand that. The heavenly smell of a freshly cut evergreen tree totally signifies Christmas. However, as a formerly single woman for many, MANY years, the idea of wrestling a real tree into a stand and taking the time to water it every day so it didn’t turn into a pathetic Charlie Brown-type of Christmas tree, never appealed to me. Besides, I love watching the lights at night on my Christmas tree and one week wouldn’t be long enough.

Theoretically, artificial trees could stay up all year long. Not that I’d want to be known as the Crazy Lady who has an artificial tree in her living room decorated with pastel lights and Easter Eggs in April or red, white and blue lights and American flags in July. I’m sure people will find reasons to call me the Crazy Lady soon enough and I don’t need a year-round decorated tree in my living room to give anyone additional ammunition.

Nevertheless, I am sure that before this weekend is over, the tree will be up and the lights will be out and the gifts will (hopefully) be wrapped and placed under the tree. I love all things sparkly and Christmas is the absolute best time of the year for me.

Let’s just hope the Day-Quil continues to work its magic and I don’t give in to this cold before the job is done.

So this crazy lady is signing off to go on a mission and untangle some lights. Provided, of course, she can find the box she stored them in last January!

Black Friday? Who Needs It? (Well, Except for Maybe the Retail Industry…)

So the other day I bought a couple more Christmas gifts. I’ve never been one of those people who feels the need to get up at 2AM on the Friday after Thanksgiving to hit the stores to begin my Christmas shopping. For one thing, I’m not crazy about mob scenes at the mall. And for another, well, I like to sleep in wayyy too much.

Instead, I’ve been buying a few gifts every pay period. So we’re pretty much down to the stocking stuffer kinds of things by now. You know – the everyday things that people need but don’t feel like spending their hard-earned cash on.

Like socks and underwear.

I bought Vince a package of socks because he was complaining about his old ones. And when I got home from the store, I gave them to him. Duh.

Clearly, there is a flaw in my thinking when it comes to early Christmas shopping, since I seem to be giving the stuff away before Christmas. So on December 25th when there is nothing under the tree what am I gonna say? “Hey, honey, remember that package of socks I gave you in November? Well, Merry Christmas!”

The other day I bought him another gift online – one of his two “major” gifts (and, no, we’re not talking a new Maserati. Our budget for major gifts is rather minor). At any rate, I excitedly told him the package will be here on Tuesday – and I know I won’t be able to wait until Christmas morning to give it to him.

Maybe I’ll have to make sure to put a bow on the package so he knows for sure it is an early Christmas gift. And maybe that way he’ll know not to expect a whole slew of packages under the tree.

Or maybe I should show a little self restraint and not give him the gift early?

. . .

Nah. I don’t have that much self restraint. But I want you to know that I did think about it for about a whole half a second (that’s what those little dots were…me thinking.) (Hey, now – there is no need to be sarcastic.)

There is an upside to giving him things well before the holidays. It means that I have fewer packages to wrap. I’m a terrible gift wrapper. I either don’t cut enough paper to sufficiently cover the gift, or I have so much excess that I end up winding the paper around the thing a couple times. Most people in this situation would simply cut off the excess paper. Not me. Because if I do, I end up cutting it crooked. And so then I try to even out the cut. And I keep cutting until – you guessed it – there isn’t enough paper to sufficiently cover the gift.

Sigh.

I once dated a guy whose day job was as a finish carpenter. His Christmas presents were wrapped with such precision – perfectly straight cuts with not one inch of excess paper. He’d tape the ends with such a small piece of tape that it was nearly invisible to the naked eye. And the bow would be placed drop dead center on the gift. I used to watch in awe when he wrapped gifts. He, on the other hand, would watch in utter dismay whenever it was my turn to wrap gifts. “Oh, for crying out loud, Jane,” he eventually exclaim. “Step aside. I’ll do it!”

Yeah, dumb like a fox, I am.

Vince, on the other hand, has not shown an iota of interest in taking over the gift wrapping chores. Thus, I have become a firm believer in gift bags. Throw the gift in a gaily decorated bag, toss in a couple sheets of tissue paper and – voilà – done. Make me a sandwich.

Not only that, but they’re reusable. In our family, we give away the gifts and then we get all the tissue paper and gift bags back. We were being green before being green was cool. My parents simply called anything else “wasteful.”

Except my mom would also give me back anything I attempted to wrap in paper. She’d carefully pick off the gobs of tape I’d slapped on the package to make sure it stayed closed and would hand me back the paper to reuse the next Christmas. I’d roll my eyes and say, “Oh come on, Mom. Unless I get you the exact same thing next year, I will not be able to fit that particular piece of wrapping paper back on any gift.”

Still, she’d hand it back to me and give me a stern lecture on being wasteful. So I learned to shut my mouth and simply accept the mangled sheet of crookedly cut paper with holes in it from where the tape could not be easily removed.

No wonder I learned to use gift bags.

Anyway, like I said, if I don’t stop handing out gifts early, I won’t be needing all that many gift bags. Unless I decide that Black Friday is a very good day to go out shopping. For myself. I won’t even expect anything to be gift wrapped.

Heyyy…now there’s a wonderful idea! Let me think on that a minute . . .

(Really, now. Sarcasm doesn’t become you.)