The Shopping Bug

Posted by Cynical Sarah on December 21, 2006

This weekend I went through shopping withdrawal. I don’t normally make a habit of shopping a lot, but when the holiday season hits, I enjoy having a real reason to hit the mall for marathon shopping session.

Last weekend, I went shopping for a few hours before my hubby’s hockey game and the shopping bug hit. During the week I even made some shoe shopping excursions and tried the shops downtown for gift ideas for family and friends.

Now the idea of shopping is firmly implanted in my head and won’t go away. I had big plans to head to the mall this weekend for hours on end and not come home until I had a few gifts taken care of. My husband is nearly impossible to buy for, so it literally could take weeks to find the perfect gift, that’s not an electronic that he would just be disappointed with because he didn’t take the time to research and pick it out himself.

So anyway, the weekend came and Troy got some crazy urge to turn out condo upside down and inside out trying to figure out what he could get rid of so we could reorganize and get our place looking nicer. It was a great idea that I’d been pressing for a few different times, but I had to patiently wait for him to figure out he wanted to do it on his own.
I never expected it to finally hit him right smack in the middle of prime shopping time for Christmas. But, I should have expected it since his whole goal is to get the place nice so we can decorate it for the holidays.

So Thursday night, he started his grand adventure in cleanup by cleaning the glass in the gas fireplace so we could get it up and running again. If you can believe it, we’ve had our heat and the gas fireplace completely shut off for more than a year now, and just figured out this week (because of the massive cold temps and snow) that it was completely off and we had no idea how to turn any of it back on.

So he cleaned the fireplace and worked on going through a closet or two to kick off his brilliant cleanup idea. A few hours later, he realized there was no way we were going to get it all done that night, and the rest was put off until Saturday.

Saturday – the day I had planned to shop for hours. The shopping bug had hit hard and it was a tossup if I was actually going to go through with the massive cleanup idea I’d wanted to happen for quite some time, or ditch it all and head out shopping.

You see, shopping for gifts is one of the few things that can still put me in the Christmas spirit each year. It’s been a long time since Christmas has seemed “magical” – probably not since elementary school – but I still enjoy going out and finding gifts for other people. I think it’s a combination of the holiday music in all the stores, and seeing everything all decorated, and perhaps even the fake holiday cheer salespeople have to have while they work.

It snowed this week, which put me a little more in the holiday spirit up until I had to be out in the cold and snow and it screwed up my public transit. Nothing takes away what little nice feelings I had about snow like arriving an hour later to work than you planned because thousands more people decided to use transit because of bad roads.

Plus, I’m not heading back to South Dakota to spend the holidays with my family this year, so I’m not looking forward to it as much as I would normally. Finally spending a Christmas with my husband will be great, but it’s going to be weird not having the traditions and “my” Christmas that I’m used to.

So, I’m taking what little holiday spirit building I can find wherever I can, and that means lots and lots of shopping. And I gave that up this weekend to clean.

We spent all day Saturday pretty much on going through every nook and cranny we have in this place and our storage unit in the basement to figure out what could go and what should stay and where it should all be stored. By Saturday evening, we finally called it quits in order to do a quick hiding of boxes and have a couple friends over to watch TV and just relax and visit.

My hopes were high that I would at least be able to feed my shopping urges on Sunday. I was impressed when Troy made it through a full day of cleaning rather than just an hour or two. I figured there was no way he’d want to dig back into it on Sunday as well.

I was wrong. Once we got up and had some breakfast, he started pulling out all the boxes we’d hidden to go through more and get it all figured out. My job was mainly to photograph things we wanted to sell while he finished going through the stuff he had left to sort. Suddenly it was early afternoon, I was still in pajamas, and I needed to shower and get ready for us to leave to go to his hockey game.

Another day of shopping was lost, because by the time the game was over, the mall on the way home had closed for the day as well.

I’m determined to get in some time this week though. I will not be thwarted on my quest for the perfect gifts for people as well as some holiday spirit building for myself. As long as my sister-in-law is game, we’ll be doing a workout after work on Thursday and then fit in a few hours of shopping and some dinner so I can get a quick fix before next weekend so I can catch up a little.

- Sarah L. Polson

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Tags: christmas, humor, shopping

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