I have a confession to make: I'm not a good Christmas shopper.
Just ask my wife and she'll tell you. I get cranky in the mall. I think it's a combination of the crowds, the looming demands of the list in my back pocket, the feeling that I'm fighting against the intangible: time, expectations, disappointment.
"This is supposed to be fun, you know," Chantal says to me far too often.
Every year (after the shopping's done, of course), I resolve that next Christmas, I'm going to let the intangible remain intangible, that I'm going to remember it's supposed to be fun.
And every year, I make the same promise. Again.
We hit the mall on Friday, drawn like so many to the siren-song of Black Friday — a name made more horrifying by its dichotomy: The promise of finding the ever-elusive ultimate bargain and an indictment of the insatiable consumerism that drives the economies of the world's richest nations.
It's a name that I — raised in an Irish-Italian Catholic home — can't help but link to Good Friday, the day Jesus Christ was betrayed and turned over to the Romans for judgment. Except I'm not sure that on Black Friday there's a promise of redemption.
As we were swallowed by the crowd, I could feel my anxiety rising. The rush was on. My one thought: We needed to get through this list as quickly and efficiently as possible and somehow make it out alive. It could be done, I told myself, but it would require speed and single-mindedness of Herculean proportions.
Chantal gave me the bemused and somewhat exasperated look she often gives me when I get that man-on-a-mission gleam in my eyes. I nominate her for sainthood (again, I nominated her last year, too).
I attempted to move through the crowd like an avenging angel. Zig-Zagging this way and that, trying to flow like water. My eyes darted from list to storefront, list to logo, list to pricetag, pricetag to pricetag.
I was an efficient, snarling machine. OK, not that efficient. If confronted with a lineup, I wanted to explode in frustration. If confronted with a choice between one item and another, I became muddleheaded and paralyzed by indecision. If stymied, unable to tick something off the list because it was sold out, I wanted to tear the list into confetti.
Chantal would smile slightly and try to distract me with a chipper attitude, but I was having none of it.
Did I mention the sainthood thing?
While I melted down, I saw others zipping through the crowd with the same look of mingled hopefulness and panic on their faces. I was certainly not alone. We all probably feel this way to varying degrees from time to time during the pre-Christmas rush.
It's fight or flight, except the sabre-tooth cat is the excitement on someone's face when they open the perfect gift we got them.
The thing is, I really like Christmas. I love getting gifts. I love giving gifts — that look of excitement is something I crave. The message of fellowship, good will and hope is a message the secular and spiritual alike can get behind.
I love supporting our local economy by shelling out.
Christmas is mint- and cinnamon-scented awesomeness.
But Christmas has its own dichotomy. It celebrates what is best about us while bringing out some of the worst. Not greed, selfishness or covetousness though. Not only would it be cliche to say, I don't think it's generally true. Most of us just love giving gifts because we like making others happy.
I'm talking about the countless videos of shoppers in the U.S. and U.K. driven to paroxysms of Black Friday madness. In poor countries — which is to say much of the rest of world — that kind of insanity is limited to food riots and anti-government protests.
In the rich West, we riot over the promise of bargains.
Well, not in Canada, at least not so far. We might get cranky in a crowd at this time of year, but Canadians have thankfully restrained themselves from buffeting a stranger about the head and face over a flatscreen TV.
This is not some anti-capitalist rant. It isn't a bad thing to celebrate the people you love by buying them gifts. Canadians each spend, on average, about $900 at Christmas. It accounts for at least 10 per cent of yearly total spending. Christmas is good for the economy and good for families.
We might not be rioting in the stores, but some of us do display a lack of fellowship, an abscence of good will and a vacuum of hope in the run-up to Dec. 25.
I'm talking about people like me who get cranky in the mall.
So here's my pledge this year and I hope you join me. I'm going to keep fellowship, good will and hope top of mind when I'm out gift shopping. I'm going to wear a real smile for my fellow shoppers and for harried sales staff (or I'm going to bear my teeth until it becomes a real smile).
I'm going to remember: This is supposed to be fun.
It really, really is.
Mark Gentili is the managing editor of NorthernLife.ca.
