Project Happily Ever After

Your dog does not want one of these. I know. He told me.

Yesterday I read the following tweet: “25 more days of Christmas shopping. Am I the only one who hasn’t started yet?”

I stared at my computer screen and thought, “Am I abnormal?”

It had only been three days since Black Friday—the so-called official start of the Christmas season—and people who hadn’t yet started shopping were already being relegated to the “last minute shoppers” club.

Really?

Call me a Scrooge, but I’ve never understood the allure of Black Friday. Over the years, various Black Friday enthusiasts have tried to explain it all to me. Still, to me, the words “Black Friday” make me think of four things:

1. Death, due to trampling
2. Mall coma (see death)
3. Crowds (see death)
4. Traffic (see death)

I also don’t understand the attraction of shopping in general, especially this year—during the middle of a recession. This is what I want to know: when did “the holidays” become synonymous with “buying crap for people who are just going to re-gift that crap, return that crap, or donate that crap to Goodwill”?

I only enjoy one thing about holiday shopping, and it’s that I get to see and make fun of all of the overpriced crap that lots of people will buy for People Whose Right Minds Were Destroyed By The Purchase of Overpriced Crap that No One Wants.

Crap like the Snuggie for Dogs. Yes, such a thing really does exist, and you can bet that many an embarrassed dog is going to get such a thing this year for Christmas. Crap like the Tickle Me Extreme Ernie. As if Tickle Me Elmo were not enough, now we all need to rush out and trample one another so our kids will be the first to have Extreme Ernie, too. Or the Zhu Zhu Pet Hamster, because why give your kid a real hamster in a ball when you can stand on an enormous line and part with $131.99 for a stuffed animal in a ball instead?

Don’t get me wrong. The holidays can and should be about giving, but I don’t necessarily think they need to be about shopping.

Over the years, I’ve been scaling back my holiday shopping. I started doing this for my personal sanity. Each year, after spending hours and hours in malls in search for gifts for everyone in my family and my husband’s family, too—not to mention co-workers, my hair stylist, my neighbors, my friends, my book club, and my paper boy—I felt stressed, disappointed, and drained.

At some point each year, I’d break down and cry. This usually happened after the 100^th person asked me, “Are you ready for Christmas?” and I cursed that person out for asking such a stupid and unoriginal question. I’d feel like a failure for not being able to get it all done. The gift buying, gift wrapping and gift mailing sucked every bit of happiness out of my body. I’d feel overwhelmed. Then I’d overeat. Then I’d feel fat, and so I would overeat some more.

Come January I’d be ready to check myself into a place called Serenity House or some such.

So I slowly stopped doing it. I talked family members into only buying gifts for the young children. I stopped buying gifts for my friends. I quit my job, so that took care of my coworkers. And I gave whatever service person who happened to help me out during the month of December an extra big tip.

Now I only buy for my daughter, her young cousins, and a couple business associates. That’s it. The benefits of this approach are enormous. I no longer suffer from mall coma because I no longer go to malls during the month of December.

I don’t stress over the perfect gift to give my husband because I don’t buy him gifts anymore. We have an extra fancy date night instead.

I have a lot more time, because I’m not spending that time trying to badly wrap things that have no business getting covered with wrapping paper to begin with.

Because I don’t gift many gifts to others, few people give gifts to me, which means there’s a lot less crumpled up wrapping paper to clean up on Christmas morning. It also means that I have fewer cardboard boxes to store, and I no longer have the disappointment of opening a bunch of gifts only to find that the one thing that I really and truly wanted–-everlasting happiness and peace of mind—does not come in a gift-wrapped box.

Most important, I regularly experience that warm fuzzy feeling that one gets from doing good deeds because good deeds are how I’ve come to define “the spirit of giving.” Rather than spending my time shopping and gift-wrapping, I do the following:

• Spend more time with family and friends because experiences are priceless and the memories last forever (unless momnesia or senility wipes them out, but I digress).
• Plan special experiences, such as taking my daughter to see a Christmas themed play or having a family bike ride through town so we can look at all the holiday lights.
• Make sentimental gifts for family members. For instance, each year my daughter and I write a story together that she illustrates. We give it to her grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
• Cook more, because I like to cook and other people like to eat. It’s a win-win.
• Try to be more giving of my time and energy.
• Hug more. Smile more. Say, “I love you” more.
• Do at least one charity project, whether it’s helping a needy family, donating to Toys for Tots, or buying groceries for a food kitchen or holiday meal for the homeless.
• Practice random acts of generosity—giving a waitress an extra big tip, letting someone else have a parking space that has my name written all over it, that sort of thing.

I encourage you to try my Less Shopping, More Giving approach this year. I think you will find that your holidays are much easier to survive.

Next: How to communicate your needs this holiday season.

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