I’m dreaming of a Black Friday

It’s Black Friday and I have not set foot in a single store. My objective is to avoid shopping malls and big-box chains until 2012.

Christmas shopping is intended to get everyone into the holiday spirit. Not me. My shopping is strictly utilitarian:  enter store, find what I need (or not), exit store. The only store I actually browse is Home Depot. Christmas shopping in crowded stores, especially under pressure to find something (anything!) for a hard-to-buy-for loved one, is a bah-humbug experience. I can’t enjoy the holidays until the ordeal of shopping is over.

My aversion to Christmas shopping is nothing new. When the Navy sent us to Japan in 1966, my wife and I were looking forward to a non-commercial Christmas in a mostly non-Christian country. To our dismay, the Tokyo merchants had recently discovered Christmas and were embracing it with same manic enthusiasm the Japanese bring to manufacturing and baseball. Every store in the Ginza pulsated with decorations. Christmas carols blared from loudspeakers. One memorable sign read: “Melly Xmas.”

My holiday outlook has not softened over the years. I’m even grateful I do not have grandchildren at Christmas time, because the obvious delight of watching grandkids open presents might not compensate for the traumatic feeding frenzy of a Toys”R”Us store.

Last year I did Black Friday for the first time to get a sale price on something I needed. I stumbled into the store at dawn, found what I wanted in five minutes, and then spent an hour in the longest checkout line I’ve ever seen. Never again.

This year I needed to buy a couple of items of clothing for the holidays, so I anticipated Black Friday by visiting a Kohl’s store just before Thanksgiving. The store didn’t have what I wanted in my size but Kohl’s web site did. Paying $6.95 for shipping beats an hour in the checkout line.

What gets me in the Christmas spirit is the Internet. Ho-ho-ho to you, Al Gore. Amazon.com has been my family’s Santa for years. The kids and I post our wish lists on the Amazon web site and finish our holiday shopping in minutes. I’d set out milk and cookies for Amazon.com if I could.

I won’t avoid all the stores, of course. In a week or two I will spend a leisurely evening on Albuquerque’s luminaria-bedecked Old Town plaza and pick up a few artsy stocking stuffers in tiny, adobe-walled shops. And as I speed past the gridlocked shopping centers I may murmur “Melly Xmas.”