Hokey Pokey Wednesday: Doing the Holiday Gift Dance

             I’ve made a decision to stop buying silly, useless holiday gifts in the name of love.

            The retail industry is adept at tugging on our heart strings. They embed the message: Show your love through gifts.

            The more you give, the more you love them.

            This is so not true. If love could be measured in money, rich kids would all be happy. Check out the celebrity reality shows past and present (IE: Hilton, Kardashian) and you’ll see that some rich kids grow up miserable and broken.

            Shopping not only eats at my wallet, but also my time. I absolutely refuse to go the mall. But I even resent shopping locally. I just cannot stand the commercialism – and worse – the misleading promise of it all.

            Of course we should give our kids something – but not everything!

             I notice that I’m getting all sorts of e-mails about stocking stuffers now. That’s become the next big marketing push. Heaven forbid those stockings aren't bulging with goodies - even if you've spent hundreds of dollars on a gift already!

            I show my love to my kids every day by guiding them through life, giving them food and shelter, and nurturing them with love. Material gifts are a bonus.

            I’m not saying anything new here, I know. And I’m not going to wage a full-scale war against holiday shopping. Let people whip themselves into a frenzy at the mall. I’m not giving into all that nonsense anymore.

            Buddha said, “Simplicity brings more happiness than complexity.”

             I think that fits this situation well. Too many gifts clutter Christmas.

            Think of babies and animals, happy to play with boxes and wrap.

            I’m heading to my writing group now. This is my gift to myself.

            The greatest gifts are, in fact, things that cannot be wrapped – like helping my son through the maze of colleges and applications. It is the gift of his future.

            And like hugging my son Casey, and telling him how much I love him.

            Spending time with our kids is a gift.

            Shakespeare wrote, “Things won are done. Joy’s soul is in the doing.”

            I don’t think “shopping” was the “doing” he was referring to. Just a wild guess.

Tightrope Tuesday: Groceries Strike Again

     Today it was all I could do to produce dinner.
     These kids have a thing about eating. They like to do it.
     I find the whole thing overwhelming. Not the act of eating, but all the steps leading up to it.
     Shopping SUCKS.

The store is soooo big.

You have to inspect all the fruits and vegetables. You have to decide if you'll spring for the organic stuff or risk some slow, glowing insides death by pesticides. You have to search the aisles for all the things they've moved since the last time you were there (they love to do that - villains!) You have to go back to the other side of the store for the things you didn't notice on the list that were over there. If you suffer from OCD you have to inspect packages to make sure they haven't been tampered with, and then try to placate yourself by thinking, I haven't heard any reports of tampered products killing people for years. You have to wait on a line for a clerk, or self check-out the mound of stuff yourself. (That's always fun. Once I hit the "Spanish" button by accident, which wasn't so bad until I got to the produce.) You have to go to different stores to get certain things.
     OMG. All this trouble just to eat. Is it really worth it?
     My son's list was compiled with the seriousness of The Ten Commandments.

     And really, I want him to be happy. He deserves it. He works hard in school, and is doing so well. He just got his second on-sight college acceptance yesterday, with another merit scholarship. He needs to have brain fuel. But why do I have to drag my butt around buying everything?
     I could send him shopping. But it seems mean. He really is a great son, and he doesn't ask for all that much. It seems to be important to have these food items - and for me to cook them - and he's satisfied. Considering the problems some people have with their kids, I can't complain. But still I am overwhelmed.
     I bought so much, and still I have have to get dinner for Thursday and beyond.
     I don't know how people do it. And then there's the holidays - made even more evident by the depressing music playing in the store, making me oh, so sad. Not music to shop by.
     I am grieving for my aunt, and I'm sure that is making everything more harder for me. Normally I joke about all this more.
     Yes, some laughter is in order.

   
     Which is the payoff of course - laughing with the kids as we're plopped down at the dinner table.
      I just wish someone else did all the prep work.

Here we are outside Pancho's restaurant on Michael's birthday - it's nice to be served sometimes!

Hokey Pokey Wednesday: Our Search For Happy Endings

This post was going to be about what passes for Christmas these days: Shopping.

What is our holiday message?

Gifts = love.

If I buy you a gift, I love you. The more expensive the gift, the more I love you. And if you buy me a pricey gift, that means you love me. This is dangerous, appalling and just not true.

This brings me to my broader topic: Happy endings.


Christmas has become retail's way to manipulate us toward a fake "happy ending." All those commercials with glowing faces, jingling bells...and of course, lots of shopping. Every single one of them gliding us to that magical morning when we bestow our gifts and get the love we crave.

Or, we open our gifts and realize that the spouse who treats us like dirt the rest of the year actually loves us because they've purchased a big-screen tv for the bedroom. Now, we can numb ourselves in a large way. Problems solved.

But happy endings don't last. How can they? We don't freeze in time...We don't stop existing just because we've gotten the moment we were promised. The only true "end" comes when we die. So building our hopes around a "happy ending" (a wedding is another good example) can only lead to an emotional letdown. What goes up must eventually plummet. Television and the media revel in the "coming down" as well. All you have to do is watch reality tv, read a magazine or catch the evening news. 

The problem is that we're raised to think we can only be happy if someone else loves us.

It's the Cinderella complex, and hey - it's in every romantic comedy (and yes, I watch them too.) No matter how messed up the couple is, they find their way into each others' arms. Sorry, but that's not going to happen in real life, folks. And if it does, it won't last - because people revert to their true selves.

Ironically, a movie I hated - The Break-Up - is more realistic. The couple breaks up (as promised), and they take time to work on themselves. They run into each other in the end. Will they get back together? We don't know. That's where we're left. I like that, in retrospect. At the time I saw it, I'd just broken up with a boyfriend. I sobbed through the whole thing. I didn't think I could be happy without a man. I felt cheated because the couple in the movie did actually "break up" without magically working things out.

We can love people. We can miss them. We can grieve for them. But ultimately, we cannot let them control us. We need to seek inner happiness. If we love ourselves, we are never alone. We are our own best friends.

Now that's a happy ending.