December days go by faster than any other month; I can't believe it's the fifth already. In South Florida the month from October 24 when Hurricane Wilma struck through Thanksgiving crept along as slow and punchdrunk as the traffic, halting and crawling through lightless intersections like refugees through a minefield.
But the Thanksgiving through Christmas month seems by contrast to be a free-for-all worthy of the Amazing Race, a blur of traffic whizzing around all over the region from dawn through midnight every day. It seems that everyone is out and about at once, and unlike the post-Wilma slowdowns, no one stops. No one can. Once someone leaves the driveway, there's nowhere to park!
Courtesy is the first casualty of the shopping season, with the crush of stressed shoppers pushing, shoving, and grabbing the disappearing merchandise of video games, ipods, perfumes and purses with the same feverish panic they snatched up pre-Wilma food, ice, water, batteries and generators. Perhaps "Peace on Earth, good will to men" is more than just a Christmas ideal; perhaps it is also our feeble attempt to apologize for all the aggravation we created since Black Friday.
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3 comments:
I am always astonished every year when the pollsters publish the results of their surveys asking how much people plan to spend Christmas shopping each year. This year's number was roughly three times the amount it cost a church group I belonged to to build a home in Agua Prieta, Mexico. (OK, so a lot of the building materials were donated, and yeah, we had economy of scale, since we built eight of them. but still ...)
Here's a thought: cut your Christmas spending by a third, and send the difference to an organization that builds houses for people who really need them. Will the people you buy gifts for really notice the difference?
I agree Carol Anne...but the problem is most people are too caught up with themselves and their families and being generous to people already over privliged. I finally got my mom to give me a donation of a llama (or some other animal) for a village from the Heifer organization for christmas, but it took years of persuasion.
On a nother note, getting back to the rush and rudeness NBK was talking about...I go through Grand Central station everyday to get the commuter rail and it's been getting more and more busy every day with people coming in to shop and sight see. And yesterday I literally ran into a kid that had stopped to look up at the light display on the ceiling. It hit me then that I was so frustrated with the extra people and feeling in a panic that I haven't gotten cards or a single present, that I just stopped looking around, was grumpy, and expected people to just get out of my way. Ahh I hate that. That's not me. Anyway, sounds insignificant now, but I felt terrible and thought I should try to be a little more courteous and patient (and maybe chip away at that aweful NYC stereotype). I mean really we should encourage people to look and wonder at the beauty of our city rather than curse them for slowing us down on the sidewalk.
Jill, I agree, Heifer Project is great.
Meanwhile, getting back to the original post ... what I really hate is when the holiday music piped into the mall gets aggressive. Suddenly, "Carol of the Bells" is no longer a haunting melody in a minor key; instead, it is a compelling command:
Go shopping now,
must get some stuff,
keep buying more,
sure, it gets rough.
We must go shopping,
we must go buying,
we must get good stuff,
Christmas is here.
Merry merry merry merry Christmas,
Merry merry merry merry Christmas.
It's perhaps ironic that I live within a half mile of the two biggest malls in the state, but I hardly ever shop at them.
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