Another year, another round of Black Friday Walmart shoppers pepper spraying each other for awesome deals. What is it about Xboxes that drive people mad? You just don’t hear about Playstations leading to bloodshed.
(Oh yeah. Except for that Philly thing. I guess there is that. Point taken.)
Anyway.
So this year we went through this whole three week phase, jockeying around the penultimate question that defines the embarkment onto federally mandated holiday joviality: what the hell do you want, anyway?
In past years, this has been an easy topic to tackle. In 2007, it was all clothes and books – I was two weeks off the plane at that point and had brought few belongings with me. In 2008, it was the variety of items that didn’t yet make the successful transition from our wedding registry to our kitchen. Then in 2009, everything went to hell and we didn’t do much of anything. Last year, we spent the holiday season making up for the acerbic prior season.
2011 has been a very different year for us. The stuff we needed, we bought – mostly tax deductable business expenses. Our technology needs are pretty well met. No screaming need for new clothes. As of November, the car has finally been paid off. Expensive jewelry already purchased back in July. It’s just been that kind of year.. somewhere along the line our increasingly practical and realistic wants finally met an increasingly reliable revenue stream, and we just hit equilibrium. We’re good on clothes and can’t rationalize expensive toys.
So what do you want for Christmas, anyway? Shrug. I dunno; I’ve been pretty good lately.
I began reflecting a couple months ago that for the first time at least in my life, I’ve been feeling the reality of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you aren’t familiar with it, the idea is that we prioritize needs with the most basic survival ones – food, water, air, shelter, sex, etc. – at the foundation, supporting a hierarchy that includes things like safety and love, ultimately extending up into higher cognitive strata like creativity and moral realization. In other words, it’s easier to enjoy thinking when you’re not starving or drowning.
And then you got the unemployed guy over in Riverbank who camped out front of a Best Buy for a week to score a deal on a big screen LCD to replace the one he bought by camping out front of the Best Buy the year before.
Sigh. Okay, whatever.
We finally just decided that it was silly to pretend that we’re showering each other with gifts when we’re just spending our own money on stuff we don’t need. We’re going to do little gifts this year, and then buy what we really want/need: a working garage door opener and a dishwasher. They’re not sexy, but dammit, we’re both tired of scrubbing our own dishes.
Other than that, we plan to enjoy good company and some well earned downtime, some nice holiday music, plenty of good food, and at least one Christmastime expedition into San Francisco to see the big tree at Macy’s. Then we can get back to talk of travel, catching Les Miserables in the city next summer, visiting Seattle in the spring, and whatever the hell we’re going to do with the front yard now that the boxwoods have been finally ripped out. With the new driveway and wood rack out back, the back yard is mostly under control.. time to start talking about paving a new walkway in front..
No, don’t really need the Top Ten Toys For 2011. Someone wants to buy us a new tablet, hey, we won’t turn it away and we’ll be grateful, but really. It’s not something I’d want to camp – or blast someone in the face with pepper spray – for.
But to each their own. I guess holiday tradition is where you find it.
When you get a chance, enjoy this extended Daily Show piece about Fox’s 2011 War on Christmas seasonal idiocy. Hilarious and worth watching.
Part 1:
Part 2: