The Thanksgiving season means we should all have our Christmas shopping done, as the stores want to get their summer merchandise out onto the shelves.
As for me, I haven’t started yet, although I don’t have a very crowded list. My wife is a great shopper, so I don’t have to worry about presents for many people. But she never buys her own, so that job falls to me. and I’ve proven not to be very good at it.
As a matter of fact, I’ve proven so feeble at gift shopping that from time to time I’ve thought a few tweaks ought to be applied to the whole system. Maybe more than a few.
For example, this is how stupid I’ve been when it comes to getting her a present: We hadn’t been married that long, and I decided to go buy her a dress for Christmas. What prompted me to do that remains a mystery today, as I never even bought myself any clothes.
Nevertheless, I didn’t see how I could go wrong with that choice. I soon found out.
Women are so particular about what they wear that it takes hours for them to pick out their own dresses, and here I was picking one out for her in a matter of seconds. Was I nuts?
I went to a store totally unprepared. For one thing, I’d assumed dresses came in sizes small, medium and large. I soon found out they came in numbers. I took a stab at one and missed, which I wouldn’t find out till Christmas Day.
Meanwhile, the clerk kept running the tag through the register and finding reasons to take 10 percent off, then 25 percent, then 50 percent. By the time she was done, the dress cost $8. $8!
Why all the discounts? Who knows? Maybe they knew nobody else wanted it. Maybe they found out it had been smuggled in from Mayanmar.
Anyway, I bought the dress, brought it home and wrapped it up. Which, incidentally, was quite the accomplishment itself. My $8 dress had about an 8-cent wrap job.
When she opened it, she pretended to like it, which I mistook for all-out enthusiasm. It didn’t even fit. It was so small she tried to wear it to work but she had trouble sitting down in it. (Even a palace guard has to sit down every once in a while.) She never complained to me about it, probably just wondering how she was going to break the news.
There was no returning the dress or trading it in. The store was so relieved to unload it that there was no way they were going to take it back.
Who knows where that dress wound up? My good-hearted wife probably donated it somewhere. For all I know it could by now have found its way back to Myanmar.
So maybe buying each other presents, instead of just leaving it all to Santa, isn’t the best strategy we’ve ever come up with. Maybe a few tweaks are in order.
Mary LoTemplio has the best tweak I think I’ve ever heard of. She’s been married for many years to Press-Republican Editor-in-Cheap Joe LoTemplio, and I imagine that’s what ignited her long-overdue inspiration.
Mary spent her professional life as an educator and soccer coach. She thus imbued thousands of kids in the Saranac Central School System with grace, intelligence and disposition. (It strikes me as odd that she couldn’t pass these ingredients on to Joe, but it shows that even the best teachers aren’t 100 percent.)
Anyway, after dealing for decades with his unappealing presents, Mary at last came up with this plan: Let everyone buy their own, and the other guy pays for it.
What a revolution! A complete makeover. A whole new system, miles better than the old one.
Recently, on her birthday, she needed a new set of luggage — too important an item to entrust to Joe. So she announced to him that, instead of him going and getting it, she’d save him the trouble and just let him pay for it.
A few days later, she revealed that it was mission accomplished. She had her new luggage, and was it ever a beauty! Way better than the second-hand duffle bag he probably would have gotten her.
“How much?” He predictably asked.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You were very generous.”
Hmmm. Maybe another tweak or two wouldn’t hurt the new system, either.
Bob Grady worked at the Press-Republican for almost 40 years, retiring as editor in 2011. For 20 of those years, he wrote a weekly column, which has continued monthly since he retired.