I was standing in line last night at Wal-Mart when a Christmas song came over the loud speakers. I tried to erase the horrible experience from my mind (which is why I can't remember the song exactly), but I do remember the realization that I came to: They are TRYING to make us think of our need to buy people stuff this early!
I know, not a real brain buster, but a few things suddenly fell into place for me.
They want us to think about buying people stuff
They want to make money off of our purchases
They want us to remember every single person who MIGHT give us a gift so we'll "remember" them this year
Our brains will overload with the shear number of people we should probably buy for
Christmas will, once again, be stressful and difficult for everyone
Being Poor only amplifies the stress
Having kids only amplifies the stress
Wal-Mart doesn't care
It's no wonder suicide statistics sky rocket during the holidays, we're reminded of how little money we have and are socially obligated to spend it. Some people even feel they need to go into debt to buy everything they should, and I have a hard time blaming them. No matter, it won't change, and I may as well grow up and deal with it.
On that happy note, I cannot think of what to buy my wife. We decided on a budget of $100 (I don't know if this is too telling of our personal budgeting), but she's told me she wants: A tile vacuum from Costco ($100 in and of itself), warm gloves (my wife's tiny, so she'd need to come with me to get them), and money to buy clothes later (which is "super fun" to open, are super fun the right words?). I've been racking my brains to think of some kind of surprise, but nothing is coming. She has no hobbies. She said she might take up cross-stitching, so I thought I might buy her stuff for that, but I'm not sure if she'll really enjoy cross-stitching all that much (I know I wouldn't). So I'm at a loss.
Do you have these people in your life who have no hobbies and are therefore really hard to buy Christmas for? What do you get them? Fruitcake?
I dodged the bullet last year when me & Mrs. C decided not to bother with gift giving. Not so lucky this year.
ReplyDeleteIn response to your title question: Yes I do enjoy fruitcake. The local kind, that is. Our version of fruitcake generally contains enough rum to knock out an elephant. Heck, some of the fruit is soaked in rum for, at least, two months.
That's crazy, all the fruitcake I've had is horrible.
ReplyDeleteAnd I wish we would get the guts to do the no present thing, but my wife sure seems to like it...
DO NOT give her a fruitcake. Get her new pillows.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Walmart is the devil.
@dbs
ReplyDeleteI could only get her fruitcake if Vinny sent me some. I would get pillows, but ours still rock (and i think we even have somenew ones from our wedding that we haven't used). And have you heard about the Walmart crater? There's a radius around Walmarts inwhich all small businesses inevitably fail. So yeah, devil.