The Only Sure-Fire Cure for the Christmas Shopping Blues

Visual Approximation of my "friend."
Clearly, the green beer has gotten to him.

By Josh Corman

Once, when I was talking to a group of my friends about our favorite holidays, one dolt actually had the gall to say that, of all things, St. Patrick’s Day topped his list. Incredulous, I told him to go jump in a lake. In the intervening years, I’ve encountered a fair few people who told similar lies, and I’ve made each of them the same offer I made the dolt. You see, I love Christmas so much that I literally can’t comprehend why others might think any other holiday superior in any way.

There are dozens of things to love about Christmas, and though I’m inclined to detail each of them for you here, I won’t. After all, we’re only a week away from the big day, and you can’t very well spend all the time between now and then parked in front of your computer, sifting through my ramblings. Instead, let me narrow my focus and sell you on the merits of one of the season’s most typically reviled pastimes: Christmas shopping.

People hate Christmas shopping for dozens of mostly valid and largely understandable reasons, chief among them crowds, lines, parking, and, perhaps most of all, the hanging reek of commercialization that hangs over every moment from Thanksgiving on. Every conceivable space seems filled with ads for smart phones or tablets or flat-panel TVs. For those of us with any sense of Christmas’ purpose beyond filling our homes with more and better technological wonders or clothes or jewelry or luxury sedans, it’s enough to turn the stomach. So what to do? I know the material barrage is sickening, but I contend that braving the hoards of red-eyed, wild-mouthed men and women who comprise the mass of holiday shoppers is totally worth it for one reason: Christmas shopping leads to Christmas giving—the most enjoyable part of the entire season.

I know how that makes me sound, but I don’t care because it’s the truth. I love giving people gifts. Few sensations can match the feeling of figuring out, in a blinding flash, the perfect gift for one of your friends or family. Sometimes (and this is rare, but unquestionably the most wonderful of shopping events), you don’t even realize you’ve actually found a great gift until you’re staring right at it. In that moment, the person and the present come together in your mind, united, never to be torn asunder. The whole process is fantastic, and if you really give yourself over to it, it can transform the way you view an ordinarily laborious task.

Take today for example. I went with my wife to Hamburg Pavilion in Lexington, Kentucky. If you’ve never had the ill fortune to navigate Hamburg at Christmas-time, let me assure you that few commercial centers on earth are so poorly designed. The best stores seem arranged so that each is as geographically removed from the others as is possible, and every turn into or out of the parking lots is blind. And yet.

My frustration with navigating that hellish quagmire born in the dark corners of some demented civil engineer’s mind was almost entirely diffused because of the acute sense of the hunt. I was shopping for five people, and, as is my custom, I started in a bookstore (this is, as I think I’ve pointed out previously, a building in which bound pages are sold, usually over counters). I love giving books for a couple of reasons. First, and most obvious, I love to get books, and so it makes sense for me to give them, at least to those people in my life who like to read. Second, and more importantly, books make great gifts because they say something about both the person giving the gift and the person receiving it, and if the giver has matched the recipient with the right book, they’ve given not just an object, but an experience, and in so doing they forge a permanent and important link, one that isn’t likely to diminish for quite a long time.

We remember great gifts not only because of what those gifts do for us, but also what they do to us, and what they say about us. Like films and books and music (especially if the gift is one of those things), we associate gifts with the times when they came into our lives and with the people who brought them. That feeling, that connection, is almost intoxicating, and once you get into the habit of searching for, finding, and giving meaningful (although not necessarily costly) gifts to those people most important to you, it becomes difficult to stop. And Christmas gives us the perfect reason to keep the cycle going.

So, today, when I found it, when that perfect gift for a friend of mine (who I’ll not mention lest he read this) revealed itself, I was drunk again on the thrill of anticipation, knowing that sometime over the next two weeks I get to make that connection again.

I know that giving gifts, no matter the spirit behind the action, isn’t what Christmas is about, and I wouldn’t want to turn this season into any more of a glossed-up mess of misdirected priorities than it is. But remember that in Christ's birth, we ourselves have received a gift, and I do think it’s vital to keep the spirit of that gift alive and take every opportunity to engage the feeling of sacrifice, to make others’ days a little brighter simply by giving them something—even an ultimately frivolous, material thing—that speaks to their personalities and lets them know that we’ve spent time and energy finding something cool or funny or interesting, just for them.

So shop with relish! Know that your time and frustration is currency that you’re spending to bring some happiness to a friend, family member, or even nemesis (you know, the guy you bought the Dan Brown novel for). Give with relish too. Make a habit of exchanging single gifts with people you might not have bought for in a while. Keep it as simple and economical as need be, and take the time to enjoy the giving and the getting.

Have a great Christmas, everybody!

By Josh Corman





P.S. - I can’t help it. Cue it up!