Christmas Shopping Season

With mixed feelings, I embrace that most frenzied time of year yet again - Christmas Shopping Season. I have mentioned before my love-hate relationship with Malls. Too much stuff, too much choice, too much temptation. Advent, the period of reflection and waiting, has instead become the Shopping Olympics of my year. So why do I succumb?

That brings us to the subject of "gift giving" and all the baggage that weighs it down. Gifts, in my family, were a way of showing affection. We were not raised to be particularly demonstrative, physically. So birthdays and Christmas were an opportunity to demonstrate our love for each other. As a child and young adult, I worked feverishly to find the perfect gift for each of my loved ones. Sometimes I made the gifts myself, like the year I made pastel paintings of nature scenes to give my Dad and Grandmother for Christmas. I even spent hours on creative wrappings. Maybe it was more about my creative efforts being recognized and appreciated than about expressing love. In truth, it was all of it.

I learned from the masters of gift giving - my Mom and Dad. Mom loved to shop. She gifted her family all through the year with bargains she uncovered in hidden racks at Bloomies and all her favorite stores. Once when I complained that Mom could not afford her generosity to me and my kids, my brother John wisely observed that it was her way of expressing her love for us. And I accepted that. So Christmas was the "mother" of all shopping sprees for Mom. She shopped up to the final hour and had her gifts wrapped only moments before we exchanged them on Christmas Eve.

For Dad, his gifts were tied up with the "bow" of his own self-esteem. If the gifts he so thoughtfully planned did not elicit the hoped for, enthusiastic delight on the part of the recipient, he felt painfully rejected. So I remember fondly his Christmas surprise to me one year during my teens - a stereo! (For all you younguns', a stereo in those days was today's I-pod.) Anyway, that was the perfect gift for me and I hadn't a clue. Looking back, I feel happy that my joy at that gift gave Dad even more joy. Now I understand.

This is too hot a topic to drop. So "shopping" and "gifts" will be featured in my pre-Christmas blogs and maybe I will blog more this month. Besides, I'm off to the Mall now. To do some Christmas shopping! And then to spend time with the best Christmas gift I ever received - my daughter Tina. Happy Birthday Tina!