Two more weeks until Christmas. That’s right, only 14 days. If you aren’t already sick of looking at your Christmas decorations, if you haven’t already gained 5 pounds from unrestrained holiday drinking and eating, if you haven’t invaded your local Wal-Mart to rip down the aisles with a shopping cart crammed full of Chinese-made products while screaming like a stressed chimpanzee, well then YOU BETTER HIT YOUR INTERNAL PANIC BUTTON AND GET A MOVE ON.
Breaking news! A woman in Cedar Rapids has all of her Christmas shopping done, according to this news article called (really) “Meet someone who has all her Christmas shopping done”. This is human interest reporting at its most cloying, complete with a picture of said woman looking smug, relaxed, and like a veritable well of tips from Real Simple magazine. She completed all of her shopping by Halloween because she refuses to let Christmas sneak up on her. “My innate nature is to plan and prepare,” she says. Ha, I like that. Much more genteel than “I’m anal-retentive, fearful of spontaneity, and possibly OCD.”
That woman’s philosophy on holiday shopping is about as joyless as Pope Benedict’s, who recently gave his annual admonishment about materialistic Christmas in which he warned that our children are being lured into the “dead-end street of consumerism”. Poor Pope. He says this every year with little public acknowledgment of his concerns. Maybe he should make all shopping in the months of November and December a mortal sin. Then we’d all have to be done our shopping by Halloween.
