Big shopping days are the Friday after Thanksgiving, the day after Christmas, and New Years Day. New Years Day is the day that women get even with their husbands for watching a zillion football games. They spend and spend and spend. The problem with all of these days and all the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas is that there are a zillion customers in the stores. To get there they cram the streets with their cars. The clerks are working themselves to death. When they get home at night they say, Oh, my feet! My feet! The best day to do Christmas shopping is the day that the stores are full of new Christmas merchandize that has not been picked over. There is a plethora of clerks a smiling. The clerks joke with you, help you find the right set of earrings for each of your twenty-three granddaughters, binoculars for your nine grandsons, a stuffed lion for your great granddaughter, books for your kids and their spouses, and then the clerks say, Have a nice Thanksgiving! Can we help you to the car? Now you have guessed the day, havent you? How many said, "Christmas Eve just before the stores close when the stores panic if they have too much leftover merchandise. They cut their prices and you buy, buy, buy! If you are not poor, you are wrong. Now days, the stores have to cut their prices much earlier to compete with Target and Wal-mart. The best day to shop is the day before Thanksgiving. Stay-at-home moms are all baking pies. Working moms are heading straight for the grocery store at noon and after work. Nobody goes shopping that day but my wife and I and a few little old ladies who have "caught on." We went shopping this morning and were home by 3:30 p.m. That was after I had the salmon at the Sizzler and my wife her usual salad bar. I had a salad bar too. When we got to the Sizzler, I was starved from shopping for our five children, their spouses, our 32 grandchildren, including two new spouses, and our great grandchild that still says, Goo, Goo! (Our triplets still say, Goo, Goo! too.) I started with a bowl of clam chowder, then salad, then the salmon, then the ice cream. Yum! Yum! Back in our home town exhausted by the metropolis of Twin Falls with its thousands of people, I laid down on the bed to get the kink out of my back that I always get when shopping. When I woke up, I had missed Jeopardy. Thats when I decided that I had to get the presents under-wrapped (that is in the wrapping under the pretty stuff. I made up the word. Go ahead and use it). I needed to write the name of the child, grandchild, or great grandchild on the inner wrapping or my wife might send a wrong present to a wrong person in a wrong state! She didnt want to, but she gave me a hand. Now Im sure that we will be sending a wrong present to a wrong person in a wrong state. But we have plenty of time to do it! Shop early! Be of good cheer! Damn the torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead! copyrightJohn T. Jones, Ph.D.2005 |
