Buying Things

Buying things

Is this what happens a week before Christmas when the handmade zeal has fizzled? I do know that when I published last week’s blog on making socks, there appeared, as if by magic, an ad for felting yarns, right on the page! How ever did they know that I would be a sucker for felting yarns? How did they know that I love buying materials, more than any other purchase? Along with most of the rest of America, I am being sucked into the commercialism vortex, and happily.

Not altogether happily. Last week, I met a friend at a smallish mall to do some Christmas shopping. It was a fairly hellacious experience. I love my friend, whom I don’t get to see much. The crowds, though large, were generally very polite. We all excused ourselves when whacking into each other. There were some great deals to be had. The guy collecting for the Salvation Army sang a cappella Christmas carols. So what was the problem?

Chain stores, for one thing. Huge, impersonal, loaded with cheap stuff that nevertheless didn’t seem like good buys, you get lost. Not lost as in fascinated, lost as in despairing, wondering if I’d ever get out.

My friend was on the phone a lot to her family, whose complicated Christmas lists kept changing. Where, for instance, would you go to purchase a Monopoly game set in East Longmeadow, MA? My friend is a champion shopper. She probably relished the challenge. I’m a wimp.

When I signed up for the local Secret Santa program and got my assigned wish lists from two boys, I was shocked to discover I didn’t recognize anything on them, except snowboards. When I asked a young person to decode the lists for me, I was assured the items were mostly electronic and mostly in the price range of $200. Whatever happened to Tinker toys? If I didn’t know better, I’d say these tots were trying to gouge their Secret Santa.

So with my tail between my grinchy legs, I called up the organizer and asked if I could do just one of the brothers. No dice. I tipped my hand as I complained that I wouldn’t buy this stuff (except the snowboard, and that as a Big Present) for my own kids. If she thought I was cheap, she didn’t say so, but nicely suggested I not take on this duo, that she would vet the letters and give me a more reasonable one next year. Apparently there have been Secret Santas (“from the city”) who have actually given their children televisions, etc., thereby upping the ante for the rest of us. Because, as we all know, there is no grapevine as fast, or as corrosive to satisfaction, as the “What did you get?” grapevine.

I’m not going to drone on about The Meaning of Christmas here. Children are generally slavish conformists, especially if they’ve been raised on the Idiot Box (what a quaint term!) with its hours of ads sandwiching in minutes of programming.

I believe in giving gifts. To give a gift is to think with imagination about what would please someone else, what would engage them more happily with life. This is a tall order for a necktie, I know. But the “To hell with it, I’ll get X a necktie” is a sorry cover for not caring about X enough to think for five minutes about what the poor guy would actually like. For the right person--a twelve year old boy, perhaps--a necktie would be a marvelous thing—a celebration of his coming of age, an excuse for the charming ritual of teaching him to tie one.

It is true that some people are harder than others to find an appropriate gift for; they’ve read the latest books, are fully clothed, and are on fat, sugar, salt and flour-free diets. They seem to have their programs down, and without your help. But isn’t there some enthusiasm you could egg on in some small way? Come on now.

As for the boys’ wish lists, if I actually knew them, I’d have a fighting chance. What boy doesn’t need a small but strong catapult? Unfortunately, the rules in this particular Secret Santa program say you cannot stray from the list. Understandable. The idea here is to suggest to these children that someone Out There cares.

Which I guess is the idea behind Santa in general. For once, information about you is not used to fleece you, sell you, spam you, ruin, coerce or compromise you. Given those odds, it’s kind of a miracle that the idea of doing something nice caught on at all. If we have to don fake, itchy beards and claw together enough good will to impersonate, for a few hours, a benevolent force, it’s probably a very good idea to do it.

I’m going to find another Secret Santa program.