Gettin' My Scrooge On

After an unseasonably warm, although ferociously windy Thanksgiving day, for late November it is still relatively nice outside, somewhere in the mid-50s . . . Probably I should have camped out in a parking lot somewhere, eagerly awaiting “Black Friday.” The more I read about this holy day following a holiday, the more I suspect that I somehow lack “American” genes or something.

I do NOT like shopping, for ANYthing, EVER. Never have, really, unless you count those halcyon days of my distant youth when a trip to the local dime store (yeah, we had two of those here, in fact--Place’s Five and Dime, and the Woolworth’s next door to it) was an adventure for kids mostly isolated on a farm eight miles out of town. That had less to do with the “shopping” aspect, given that we rarely had all that many nickels and dimes to our names, than with the sheer novelty of it--to see all this incredible “stuff,” all in one place, that you could actually pick up and sorta play with while you “shopped,” stuff you had thitherto seen only on television or maybe in the Sears Christmas “Wish Book.”

On the relatively rare occasions we got to “town,” our lives truly were full of wonders.

Best time of year was the Christmas season, of course, which back then began only after Thanksgiving had passed. Most shopping in town still was situated around the courthouse square or within a block or two of it, and all the stores, which throughout the rest of the year closed at 5 on every weekday but Thursday, when they stayed open until 9, stayed open until 9 every shopping day for the 4 weeks of the Christmas season. Christmas music played from speakers above the sidewalk, and going from store to store in the brisk cold under brightly colored streetlights, with a backdrop of red taillights on the street, sometimes even snow hanging in the air more than simply falling, added still more magic to the whole experience.

This was in the late sixties and early seventies, of course, and in small-town mid-America. The nearest shopping mall was 45 miles away; 24-hour stores like Seven-Eleven didn’t even exist in our little neck of the woods.

The environment wasn’t yet conducive to competitive shopping like Black Friday, or really even to pastime shopping--even had we been so inspired, there simply weren’t enough stores to enable us to pass much time engaged in it.

While I’m not yet old enough to wax nostalgically over the “good old days,” nor Republican enough to want to return America to an even earlier time (the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century), from a 2011 vantage point, after 36 years in the workforce, having lived through and endured and mostly observed a variety of both personal experiences and social and cultural and political evolutions (heck, I remember watching JFK’s funeral on TV, and I was only a little more than 4-½ years old at the time; to this day I “remember” seeing red stripes--on our black-and-white TV--on the flag draped over the coffin; I remember Vietnam, I remember Nixon vs. Humphrey, and of course I remember Watergate and all that followed), I now wonder sometimes if those days, that little wedge of time in our nation’s history, will not eventually be seen through the historical prism as America’s having achieved its ultimate pinnacle--yes, there still were problems, deeply rooted ones like racism and sexism and so many other “isms,” and yes, we still had that “biggest kid on the block” mentality, though not to the extreme it would become, but what I remember, rightly or wrongly, was that we still had hope back then. Any man or woman had the power to “change his stars,” as Heath Ledger’s character’s father put it, in “A Knight’s Tale.”

We even often saw--and looked for--that “Made in America” stamped on whatever we purchased. We still made things in this country, didn’t just buy and sell them, and what we made generally was of much higher quality than virtually anything made anywhere else. The proverbial tide was beginning even then to turn, though.

In about 1975 I wrote a short story basically decrying the commercialism of the Christmas holiday season--not a particularly original thought, even back then; smarter people than I had been decrying the same thing for a while, although usually from a religious standpoint. I could never have envisioned--I’m not sure anyone could have envisioned--camping out in box store parking lots for days, just to secure a particular “bargain;” I am positive that no one could have envisioned a shopper going nuts with pepper spray to keep other shoppers away from a coveted item (as reportedly happened in Los Angeles this morning). But then, we would never have dreamed of stores open 24/7, either--maybe they had them in the “big city,” but they would never appear out in the sticks. Well, we’ve had our own 24/7 Wal-Mart for a lot of years now, and even a 24/7 grocery store.

Probably it’s just what Mario Puzo, who wrote books other than “The Godfather,” called “retrospective falsification,” but somehow “limits”--even as apparently essentially meaningless as a Christmas season limited to four weeks, or store hours limited to 9-5, Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Friday, 9-9 on Thursday, 9 to noon on Saturday, or purchases limited by the number of nickels and dimes in your pocket--seemed more to enhance the “shopping experience” than to detract from it.

Guess I’m just a Scrooge at heart.  My "fallback position" has always best been characterized by a lyric from a Billy Joel song:  "The good ol' days weren't always good/And tomorrow's not as bad as it seems."  (If I could remember the name of the song, I would look it up and make sure that quote is accurate.  Maybe I'm older than I think).  I'm finding that position ever less tenable, however.