Christmas Stories 2011

It has become a tradition in our family to celebrate Christmas. We sent out a Christmas card last year, and I wrote a Christmas message on this blog, and after two messages last year, I am not sure if I have enough Christmas thoughts to write more, but I can tell some true Christmas stories and then moralize them. No Christmas story is good unless it has a moral, just like no Iowa wild mushroom is good unless it is a morel. It’s the same, trust me.

Both of these stories have to do with shopping, which seems to be my Christmas theme. Here’s the first story:

It was late Thanksgiving night, and I had just beat the Swensons and Rothlisbergers in Boggle, which was weird because I have never won a board game, or a card game, in my life unless it was Trivial Pursuit or Shakespeare: The Bard Game. And the Swensons and Rothlisbergers have a knack for beating me at everything, whether it is wiffle ball, Frisbee with goals, volleyball, basketball, or fixing household items. At any rate, I was in a good mood and looking for something more to do. It was almost midnight, and I knew that many of the stores were going to open on midnight this year to begin Black Friday, as if Black Friday were as important as the opening of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1. I thought to myself, “Opening these stores at midnight could be a seismic change in history, bringing shopping even closer to our sacred family holidays!” I decided to investigate, and my mother-in-law needed me to purchase some items on sale at Kohl’s anyway, so I was in. At 11:45 I drove to the Kohl’s in Milwaukee (where I was having Thanksgiving), only to discover that there was already a line. One of the things that I tell people to make myself sound interesting is that I refuse to stand in lines longer than three people, so I didn’t stand in line. Instead, I lingered on the outskirts, only to have hecklers from the line tell me that I shouldn’t dare trying to get in the door before the line got in. I thought hecklers were supposed to be outside of lines not in them, but everything about this Thanksgiving evening was backwards, and I assured my hecklers that I would not cut in front of them, but that once I enter the store, I cannot promise I won't be really sneaky.

The line kept getting longer and longer, in proportion to the heightened anticipation of those standing there. Once they opened the door, Hell did not break loose—we were in the Midwest, after all. Rather, people stiffened up and walked fast, elbows not bent yet but poised for outward thrusting. It is the kind of stiffness where all the body’s joints are on the verge of snapping, like an overfilled water balloon. I am used to this kind of body action after years attending book sales and waiting with others for the Plasma place to open in the morning. At any rate, once I entered the bright overhead lights of Kohl’s, the whiff of passive aggression came even stronger, and I turned right instead of following the crowd straight. Turning right was a good idea—my mother-in-law’s requested items were on a little stand just 15 feet away. Surrounding that stand were a family of five—two boys, a girl, and what looked like a mother and grandmother—that had pulled all of my desired items off to inspect them. A Kohl’s employee had a panicked look on her face, trying to talk loudly to others, like me, so that the family could hear them. She exclaimed loudly that “This family here is making it impossible for people to get by” and “They have been here for five minutes already.” The family seemed to ignore her, which is the best solution for passive aggressiveness as far as I am concerned. I finally reminded the Kohl’s employee that the stand with the desired items had been placed in the middle of the walking aisle, so she should really complain about whoever chose to place it there rather than about a family actually looking at its goods. By the time I had finished talking, the two desired items were in my hand, which I attribute to my sneakiness. When I looked over again, they were all gone.

I bought the items, left the store and lit out for the mall, where I was going to look for some jeans. There was a traffic jam outside the mall, and I had heard that Best Buy had stopped letting people in the story at 12:15 because it was too full, which made me happy that Best Buy doesn’t carry jeans. Instead, I went to the mall, where the lights were dim and I couldn’t see five feet in front of me because of all the people inside. It was 1:00, and people were starting to get testy—the Spirit had gone to bed an hour before and so had my nostalgic notions of America, and everyone seemed to be on the verge of violence.

Upon entering the Gap, I quickly grabbed some jeans that said 80% off and were in my size. I went to the dressing room, where a teenage girl with an earpiece and a look of absolute horror on her face was trying to manage the influx. She got me a dressing room and told me that she hoped I liked the jeans. I put them on and looked in the mirror. It was awesome: they were so tight that even my leg hairs were put into relief, and I looked like a superhero, complete with ballerino bulge, with an oversized hoodie on top. I walked out in the tights to get a new pair of jeans, not wanting to lose my dressing room, but the scared teenager stopped me to ask if I needed anything. I told her, “yes, a different pair of jeans.” She looked down and burst out with two big laughs. She said, “yes you do.” She came back with bigger jeans, and I asked her if they were also 80% off. She said no, and then I told her I didn’t want them and that I was leaving. She responded, “It must be nice to get to leave.”  It was.

I left, but not before buying a toaster oven for $19.98 from a big department store and standing in a three-person line that lasted for 25 minutes due to someone whose four credit cards didn’t work and who insisted that the remote control helicopter was actually fifteen dollars less than it was.

A few thoughts to make sense of my story: Thanksgiving is, I think, the best holiday of the year for reasons that I could elaborate on, but it seems like one of those opinions that is safe to have because it is inconsequential, so whatever. Stores deciding to open their doors at midnight, or in some cases earlier, should be punished, I’ve decided, not only because they violate labor ethics by making people work at midnight on Thursday but also because Thanksgiving is supposed to mean something beyond commerce. It is like the employee complaining that people were gathering to look at deals in the aisle even though the store itself put the crap there—the stores have made one more move towards making our actual existence part of a culture that equates ritual with consumption. This is the predictable response, even though it is the true one. But I wanted to add something else: My trip to Kohl’s and the mall was undertaken solely for my eagerness for absurdity, irony, and jeans, but what I encountered at Kohl’s and at the Gap were not deals as much as real people with real concerns, and I liked seeing them, and any time I actually got to talk with them, like with the teenager at the Gap, I came away happier—a burst of light in a dim mall, I guess. Or for her, a burst of laughter at a fat guy in tight jeans. So my Christmas message is this: The crowds, the parking, the pressures, the parties, everything about Christmas is oppressive, but talking to people is not, mainly because those people are meaningful in their own right, and whenever I get to have any kind of subtle interaction with someone else, I am reminded not only of their humanity, but that they are divine, and that is really nice to think about. What Christmas celebrates is a divine birth, an event that allows every person her own divinity. Even on Black Thursday night, divinity happens.

Here’s my second story, of which the moral has already been stated above: I was in Phoenix in Christmas 2005, looking for presents at Family Dollar. That first line already tells you enough about the situation. A random guy tapped me on the shoulder and gave me an envelope that contained a Christmas message and 20 dollars, and walked away quickly. I bought my presents with it, and that was that.