Let’s Bag the Holiday Shop Talk

This is that time of year when everybody is watching me. You know all those articles about “Will They Spend?” Well, I’m one of them.

Just as people are sick of polls in the weeks before elections, and predictions about who will be in the Super Bowl before the playoffs begin, I am sick of the blow-by-blow reports on retail sales figures during the so-called holiday season. Suddenly you have to feel as if you are letting your country down if you’re not spending. One Jingle Bear too few and you’re the consumer equivalent of a Pledge of Allegiance nay-sayer.

Every year, I go through the same ritual. Retailers needn’t study sales figures. Just listen here.

Sometime before Thanksgiving, I go to the department stores, and, observing with disgust that the decorations are already up, I vow I will not return until New Year’s. Then I wait and hope for a miracle. Lo, a garage sale in the East, perhaps. Some alternative to waiting in a long line to lay down $24 for a complete set of Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I dream of a church bazaar where little old ladies sell low-cost, home-canned huckleberry jam in jars hand-painted with antique Victorian motifs. Or, wonder of wonders, maybe I’ll get a few days of free time and make something--you know, throw a few pots, crochet a dozen afghans, create a Frank Lloyd Wright Waterfall House out of gingerbread, turn my old sandals into earrings.

Then, around early December, I realize that it just isn’t coming together. So I venture forth to some quaint and charming row of small shops with little potted trees out in front, decorated with festive, tiny white lights.

Just yesterday, I hit the first of these yuppie anti-mall mini-malls. Ten unique boutiques, all in pure white with solid oak trim and skylights shining on the many useless and incredibly expensive items within. I went into the Mexican Folk Art shop, a cross between Tijuana and Bloomingdale’s. Guess whose prices?

While I thought the pink, polka-dotted, papier-mache giraffe would be the perfect Hanukkah present for Aunt Myrna, I just couldn’t see spending $300 for something that won’t go with the Lladro figurines.

I skipped the lamp shop because it was called the Lighting Studio. Somehow, the-lamp-as-art seemed like a dim idea. If God didn’t want lamps to be big and ugly, he would have intervened in the late ‘40s.

Then I went to something called the Garden Shop, although nothing was growing there except my incredulity. This was really the ultimate in the new cocooning craze. Everything was so homey that I almost cuddled up in the $600 chair made of bent willow twigs and went to sleep on the spot.

Here three women were clucking over a hideous black bucket with a flower floating in it. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” one said. “It’s only $95,” another said. I thought we had the makings of a modern fairy tale here: The Emperor’s New Chamber Pot.

The only cheap item in the shop was the $3 bar of Vegetarian Baby Soap. And after all--what decent parenting person would want baby washing his hands with meat?

In my parents’ time, it was all so simple. The choices were few. The expectations were low. Every December they would go to “the wholesale joint” and buy a case of whiskey, a carton of perfume and a few dozen wallets. Then they would divide the known universe into perfume ladies, whiskey men and wallet kids.

No such luck for an ‘80s lady. But retailers need not fear. Sometime around mid-December, I will wake up and panic.

“I haven’t bought anything!” I will say. Then I will pick up the paper and read that Dr. Louis Schtunk, professor of suckerology at the John Beresford Tipton Graduate School of Marketing, says, “If you can find a parking place at a mall next week, we are in for the worst recession since the ‘30s.”

Like a Stepford shopper, I will find myself dreamlike on the freeway, heading toward the Mall of No Return. I will cruise the parking lot and see a parking place. Uh-oh.

But the fall of America will not be on my conscience. As long as there is breath in my lungs and air in my head, I will go forth. I’ll get out my credit card and fall on my knees and say, “Take me, Mr. Retailer. Do with me what you will.”