The albertnet Christmas Guide

After some semantic housekeeping, I’ll provide herein my recommendations on how to get the very most out of your Christmas, or at least have a good laugh at the holiday’s expense.

Some semantic housekeeping

You might bristle at—or, conversely, rejoice in—my use of the word “Christmas” as opposed to “the holidays.” Obviously this is a loaded issue, and I gave it some thought. I decided on “Christmas” because it has become the generic term for the December 25 holiday that most of the people I know make the biggest fuss over. I’m using the term to mean something pretty specific: the day on which most Americans open gifts that are arranged beneath a tree that everybody calls a Christmas tree. I am aware that there are plenty of other holiday traditions but I’m too ignorant to blog intelligently about them.

Please don’t construe this as me prioritizing Christmas over any other cultural or religious tradition. For most of us, Christmas is not primarily a religious holiday. Almost everybody exchanges Christmas gifts but how many actually attend a special Mass? My family never did, growing up. Words like “stocking,” “present,” “candy,” and “get” were on everybody’s tongues but we never uttered “Eucharist,” “Mass, “liturgy,” or “Holy Communion.” Sure, we all pretend this holiday is about more than just giving, getting, and eating, but generally any putatively deeper meaning is just tacked on for good form. (It’s kind of like how everybody had to mourn Mother Theresa’s death simply because they’d so recently made such a fuss over Princess Diana’s.)

So, no—this post isn’t about any so-called War on Christmas or on pretensions of deep meaning. It’s about the typical Christmas holiday as my family and friends have traditionally experienced it: i.e., conspicuous consumption.

The best gift ideas

The real sweet spot for Christmas is when you’re kid and aren’t expected to give anyone anything. You just get, get, get and it’s awesome. Then you gradually have to start thinking of others, maybe you crudely craft some gifts for your parents (like a pottery ashtray even though they don’t smoke), and eventually you buy a few things for a few people, and this escalates over the years. Then, if you’re lucky enough to become a parent, the whole thing shifts completely and you have to give, give, give. It does help when the kids write cute letters to Santa, like this one.

I confess: I really don’t enjoy gift-giving. It’s not that I’m stingy; I’m actually fairly generous with my time and money. (Not that you should ask for any … isn’t this free blog enough?) My problem is the inefficiency of the whole gift-giving affair: how seldom a present actually pleases the recipient. I recently saw a Nordstrom ad on the back cover of a magazine that really annoyed me. “LET’S GO GIFTING!” it says, showing all these impossibly hip, happy, and exhilarated people clutching gift-wrapped packages. One of them is literally wearing heart-shaped glasses.

Look, Nordsters, if you find gifting that thrilling you’re obviously in the thrall of the giant retail machine and it’s having its way with you. Choosing a gift should be a careful, sober thing. If you’re snatching things up impulsively enough to keep your shopping companions from getting bored, you’re moving too fast. Your approach is as naively impossible and inappropriate as heart-shaped glasses. I don’t want to seem like a scrooge or anything, but I would really, really enjoy crushing those glasses under my boot.

I once got caught up in that let’s-go-gifting “spirit.” It was awful. I came into some money (something like $100) right before Christmas in 1983 and my brothers and I went on a spree. I remember my brother Geoff being totally enchanted by a wristwatch because it actually ticked. So what? It’s not like all watches were digital back then. But it was like entrapment: he was enchanted, so we had to pitch in and buy it for him. My brother Max and I somehow ended up buying each other the Police album “Synchronicity” so we ended up having it on both record and tape. It wasn’t until we got home that I realized how stupid that was. It’s not like we couldn’t have made a tape from the record and saved some damn money.

Buying gifts is hard, which I know because when I do receive one, half the time I don’t like it. And when I give one, the odds are even worse. Our poor choices demonstrate how little we really know our loved ones. My dad usually bought me books written by well-meaning environmentalists, spiritual healers, naturalists, etc. who just can’t write well. The book would begin with something like, “In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling.” I’ve tried to read these books and I just can’t. My literary standards are far too high.

Once my dad sent my wife some silver earrings. She opened the box, said, “How nice,” and then immediately turned to my sister-in-law and said, “You want ‘em?” She meant it. They were perfectly nice earrings (and probably expensive) but not her taste.

My picks for my dad weren’t much better. When I was like 12 I bought him a bike mirror. Of course this was a stupid idea. My dad was enough of a nerd for fenders and racks, but not for a mirror. He was clearly at a loss for what to say, so he said nothing. After a couple of weeks he still hadn’t mounted it to his handlebar so I asked him about it. “Oh, I have another use for it,” he said, though I never discovered what this was. He may have used it to line a landfill.

In college I bought my dad a UC Berkeley sweatshirt, which I thought he’d be chuffed to bits about, what with us having the same alma mater and all. But he never wore it. Had I thought about this, I’d have realized I’d never seen him in a sweatshirt at all. They were, I came to understand, beneath his dignity. When I cleaned out his house a year ago I half-expected to find that sweatshirt but I guess he got rid of it … possibly right away.

When gifts really go wrong it’s when the thought (i.e., what counts) doesn’t demonstrate enough love. In the Christmas of 1977, I received the “Star Wars” soundtrack (a two-record album). My brother Max only got a “Star Wars” calendar, which a) didn’t cost as much, and b) was only good for a year. Never mind that we had only one record player in the house, meaning he could hear this album as often as I could. He was hurt, and said so. The first time I played the record, I spied him sadly tracing his finger over a picture in his calendar as he listened—his face a perfect picture of forlornness—to “Lieia’s Theme.” He really did believe that this disparity in generosity meant my parents loved me more. This happened to be true, but that’s not the point. (Max, if you’re reading this: that was a joke, okay?)

So the best gift idea, if you can swing it, is the no-gifting pact. I’ve had this pact with my wife since our kids were born, and if it’s not my favorite thing about Christmas, it’s at least a huge relief. We’d both much rather pick out something really nice for each other’s birthdays, when we aren’t trying to please all our relatives at once. (This year I extended the no-gift pact to my brother Bryan and his family. His kids outnumber ours by 4.5 to 1 so this is just good economics.)

The second-best gift idea is the white elephant. If the whole point is for the choice to be awful, it’s hard to go wrong! And sometimes they really work out. Check out this simply awful “inspirational” wall hanging:

Turns out if you flip it over it makes a nice tray for holding miscellaneous doodads!

The best part is that if I ever throw up on it, or the cat pees in it, or we just decide we suddenly hate it and it has to go, I don’t have to feel bad that a friend or family member wasted any money on it.

The best place for Christmas shopping

If you head to the mall for Christmas shopping, you’re going to be immersed in a lot of the all-together-now, isn’t-this-season-exciting bullshit that the retail industry hopes will loosen your purse strings. You’ll also have to hear a lot of really awful holiday music. You might even have to dodge a lotion sniper. None of this is pleasant.

If you head to a thrift store like Goodwill, you’ll still have to endure the awful music, but you’ll avoid crowds and enjoy a much more subdued, almost moribund atmosphere. Goodwill is a great reminder of the life cycle of a consumer good: from department store to home to garage to here. And when you’ve had holiday cheer practically forced on you from every other direction, the depressed aura of a thrift store is actually kind of refreshing.

My wife and I headed over to Goodwill yesterday for some white elephant shopping. We scored this killer bobblehead for only four bucks:

It was brand-new, in the box, and even came with a battery. It talks, spewing madcap platitudes from the “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” sitcom. And I have just discovered that you would have to pay $38.99 for this bobblehead at Target—except they don’t even have Dennis. Nobody does! The only place I found Dennis was at the Amazon.com marketplace, offered by a third-party seller for—get this—$189! It seems to be a collector’s item! (What is wrong with people? How does this useless tchotchke appeal to anybody?)

Of course when you give white elephant gifts you always run the risk of spotting the object peeking out from a trash bin in the driveway as you leave the white elephant party. But the recipient of my Dennis bobblehead is from India, and after being initially completely nonplussed by it (and how can you explain a bobblehead?), she declared, “I like it. It is my first bobblehead. I don’t know Dennis, but I like him. I will keep this bobblehead.” I can’t remember the last time I felt so good after giving a gift.

The best Christmas treat

The problem with Christmas treats is the sheer glut of them. They all hit you at once—Toblerone, candy canes, all manner of fancy cookies, giant chocolate assortments, etc., and even though I almost never worry about my weight, I start to get disgusted with myself after about the ten thousandth calorie. Moving on to heartier fare, the traditional turkey dinner is all well and good, but it seems so redundant with Thanksgiving barely behind us. So the better Christmas meal, in my book, is a spiral-sliced ham from Harry & David. (No, they didn’t pay me to say this.) I had this at my mom’s house one Christmas, and she sent us home with the leftovers. The way it’s pre-cut, you can just tear off hunks of it at will, no knife required. And the thing is huge. For days you can just be in a post-Christmas fog, barely functioning as a human being, subsisting on shreds of this delicious, super-salty ham. The only problem? I just found out they’re like $90! (I think my mom got ours from the factory outlet.)

Runner-up in this category is homemade eggnog. I understand this is a terribly complicated thing to make, requiring skill and a lot of time, like it has to ferment for a couple weeks or something. Ferment? Yep. Apparently the addition of bottled booze is basically cheating. You don’t really make eggnog—you brew it. I’m finding no evidence of this on the Internet but I trust my source. I can’t put homemade eggnog as the number one best treat, though, because I’ve never actually had it. I only assume it’s amazing because why else would anyone bother? This rarified, perhaps mythical creation has the added advantage of being totally unlike all the mass-made treats that, together with all the perfect gift ideas, create this fusillade of consumption that so overwhelms me every year.

It looks like I’m running out of space, or you’re running out of time, or I’m running out of ideas for next week’s post, or all of the above, so I’m going to cut this off here. Tune in next week for The albertnet Christmas Guide – Part II!

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

The Lotion Sniper

Introduction

I spend little time in malls. The exception of course is when I’m doing my Christmas shopping. Recently I went to the San Francisco Centre on Market Street and as I navigated the curving escalators, I ruminated on two things.

First, I thought about how I used to be annoyed at the layout of these escalators: instead of lining them all up, so you could make an uninterrupted trip to the floor of your choice, the up- and down-escalators are staggered, so when you reach a new floor and want to go up another, you have to walk 180 degrees around to the next up escalator. The idea, of course, is to take you past as many shops as possible. I used to be put off by the sneakiness of this, but with so many modern technologies making our lives more sedentary, I now applaud the mall designers for forcing us to get more exercise.

Second, I made up my mind that this time I would keep a close eye out for the lotion sniper, and would make damn sure he didn’t get me again. What, you haven’t encountered the lotion sniper? Well then, read on!

Sniper Strategy

Lotion snipers only seem active during the holiday shopping rush. They seem to rely on their prey—shoppers—being dazed by the Christmas music playing in the stores. This music is particularly disorienting when three different stores are playing three different versions of the same song in a ten-minute period. I found myself catching lyrics of “Sleigh Ride” that I’d somehow missed as a kid, like “Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up it’s grand/ Just holding your hand.” As a somewhat romantic teenager, wouldn’t I have found this line compelling? How did I miss it? Meanwhile, the song seemed longer than ever before, with one version having a stanza I was sure was new: “Your thighs are nice and loamy/ The egg nog’s foamy tonight/ Let’s ditch those fuzzy knickers/ Amidst my snickers and sighs!” (Okay, I made that up. I don’t remember what the new stanza actually was.)

So while we shoppers are all dazed with music and the whole holiday shopping frenzy, the sniper expertly scans the crowd for an easy mark, which I guess would be anybody who’s not talking on a cell phone or gossiping with pals. In other words, somebody like me who’s minding his own business.

Once the sniper has you on the hook, he or she commandeers your wrist and begins an elaborate demo of three different skin products. Of course you won’t know in advance how long and complicated this demo will take, which is how you let yourself get roped into it in the first place. The sniper keeps up a constant patter laced with fancy words like “antioxidant,” “exfoliate,” “toner,” “embrocation,” and possibly even something utterly nonsensical like “Naugahyde.” (That last one isn’t a real example; I haven't paid close enough attention to remember them all.)

Lotion imbroglio

The skin care demo goes completely against my modus operandi when shopping, especially during the holidays. My goal is to be surgical: enter a men’s clothing store, go straight to the sale section, see if anything decent is heavily discounted, buy three of four of whatever I like and think my brothers and father will like, and get the hell out. I’ve never understood how people can go shopping for pleasure. But the skin product sales pitch is hard to endure even when I’m not in a hurry. It’s just a tragic waste of time all around. There is zero chance of me buying any product from these people. Whatever human failings I possess that make me such a natural victim for lotion snipers, these failings are overshadowed by my essential cheapness. All that chatter about tight skin and oily skin and dirty skin and dead skin makes it hard for me to think as I try to prepare the statement that will quickly snuff out his hope that I’ll buy anything. It gets awkward.

Perhaps it’s how I was brought up. I’ve lived more than half my life in California, but I grew up in Colorado, which may have given me certain characteristics of Midwesterners. If I were from New York City or Detroit, I might not think twice about putting the guy in a headlock and saying, “Three seconds, break neck. One, two….” Larry David, or at least his sitcom character, would put the guy down at length with consummate rudeness, making bystanders both laugh and wince. But I just somehow don’t have the heart.

I’ll never forget something that happened at The Cosmopolitan, a restaurant near my office where I once had lunch with my colleagues. The waitress was describing the special in typically overblown frou-frou foodie terms (“suffused with a parsnip emulsion and dressed with a cranberry truffle salsify” or some such) when she caught my colleague smirking. To our astonishment, she got so flustered she started to cry. “I’m just trying to do my job!” she sobbed before storming off, without having taken our orders. You’d think a waitress would have thick skin, but you never know. Could it be the same with lotion salesmen?

So I give such hucksters their audience, unable to refuse their demo. Once on the hook, I’ll writhe uncomfortably until the guy has said his piece, and then I’ll bicker politely with him over his rejoinders to my objections. Really, the only graceful way out for me is to never engage in the first place.

Ensnared again!

Despite my resolution to avoid the sniper this time, I somehow managed to fall victim once again. What happened was, I saw a woman standing in the aisle with a giant tray of juice samples. I’m a sucker for free juice. Naturally, I reached for my free sample, but just as I did, a guy appeared from behind her. “Hi, how are you?” he said with a big smile. Dammit! It was a trap! I’d been set up! This was a new tactic this year: two lotion snipers working together, like hyenas.

Unwavering in my resolve, I said, “You’re just giving juice samples, right? I’m not trying out any lotion!” He said, as if taken aback, “Lotion? No, of course not! Have some juice. This juice is from the acai berry, which—did you know?—is the richest source of antioxidants there is.” Relieved that he was just hawking juice, I let down my guard a little. Big mistake.

“Where are you from—what kind of accent is it you have?” he went on. He himself had some vague, non-specific European accent, probably fake. (For some reason lots of rip-off artists I’ve encountered have these odd accents, like the quasi-Euro guy in Chinatown who sold me a $25 Casio watch for like $60 back in ’91. As I talked him down on price he kept saying, “Hey, don't do me no favors!”) The sniper’s question about my supposed accent appealed to my curiosity because I’ve actually had a number of good honest people, over the years, ask where my accent is from. It’s a real mystery to me why I should be thought to have one. Some think I have a slight British accent, which is of course false, and one or two say Dutch, which is probably a guess based on visuals. Of course, I should have recognized right off that I’d spoken only a dozen words to this guy—on what basis could he hear an accent to begin with?

But this guy was smooth. Somehow, when he said, “Hey, I wanna show you something,” I failed to say “Oh no you don’t!” Perhaps I had the unhealthy curiosity of a rubbernecker at a car wreck, or maybe on some level I thought I could learn something from this guy about the craft of selling. Most likely I felt, on a subconscious level, as though I were already involved in a dialogue it would be rude to cut short. (Of course it’s not really a dialogue; he might ask a question, but it’s only an input into his script, to be parroted back to me later to perpetuate the illusion of conversation.) Before I knew what was happening, I was rubbing some damn salt scrub into my hands over a bowl, while the sniper waited patiently with a spray bottle to rinse them.

The artist

What did this guy look like? I’m having trouble remembering. My overall impression was that he reminded me of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, so any memory of his actual appearance is supplanted by a stock photo of The Artist. He had an exceptionally friendly demeanor, so that he could make insulting insinuations without making me angry. “Did you shower this morning?” he asked. I said I had. “You can’t just shower once a week—you have to shower every day!” he said. “And that rash on your throat? That’s from shaving. This product is second to none in making the skin relax. It will totally rejuvenate you. And blackheads?” He gestured along his nose and below his eyes. “It will completely get rid of your blackheads!” He wasn’t a big guy; how did he know I wasn’t going to say, “Who are you saying has a rash and blackheads? Why, I oughtta…”?

Meanwhile, he had flat-out lied to me. He said he wasn’t hawking lotion! So what was this? Oh yeah: a three-part total skin care regimen. I suppose neither the exfoliant nor the revitalizer nor the moisturizer was technically a lotion. But he’d moved completely beyond that part of our interaction. “Your hands get so dry, working all day for” [here there was a tiny delay as his mental machinery recalled a data point it had extracted from me earlier] “…Blascorp.” I wanted to say, “Oh, yes, Blascorp is notorious for drying out its employees’ hands.” But instead I listened politely. He was so enthusiastic about how much dirt would be removed from my hands, I was expecting to see something like the wastewater from a Rug Doctor.

What I could have said

It’s hard to think when a well-polished shtick is flooding your brain with information and you’re carrying out this weird operation with three different substances on your hands. It would be understandable not to be able to think of anything to say, but this wasn’t really the case this time. I thought of plenty of elegant ways to short-circuit the sales cycle—but I couldn’t bring myself to use them. This guy is just trying to make a living, after all, and is probably paid entirely on commission; he hadn’t really done anything to give me license to be a jerk to him. So when we got to the end and he asked which product I liked best, I wordlessly pointed to the last one, which had made the inside of my right wrist as smooth and shiny as plastic.

“Look, I’m not asking you to buy all three,” he said. “That tub there, it’s such a highly concentrated product, it’ll last you a whole year!” I thought of saying, “What are you saying, pal, I can only afford one? I thought you said this was a three-part regimen! You think I’m cheap or something? Am I not worth it?” But this would have given him a fresh opening and I was really trying to wrap up. I could have said, “It’s actually rather unsettling how smooth the skin on my wrist is now. And it’s even more unsettling that you’re the first person who has ever rubbed lotion into my wrist. My mom never even did that. I need to go somewhere quiet and collect myself.”

When he said, “Imagine your wife rubbing this into your feet!” I could have said, “I’d rather not. My wife hates my feet. She says my toes are too long. I try not to even let her see me barefoot.”

At the end I said, “I’ll think about it.” He hated that, of course. “Why come back later, after our promotion is over, and pay more? Fifty dollars is just not that much money; why not do something nice for yourself?” To which I thought to reply, “Hey, you said yourself, this isn’t just oil and lanolin here. This is a sophisticated product. Before I buy a year’s supply I need to wait a day and see if my sample gives me a rash or something!” Or I could have gotten dark and said, “Do something nice for myself, huh? Well as a matter of fact, I have a deep-seated self-hatred that makes it impossible for me to spend any money on myself. I’m actually not worth it. I really believe that. And it’s a sore subject, I wish you wouldn’t bring it up.”

Perhaps my most honest reply would be, “Who says I want smooth, healthy skin? Smooth, healthy skin is an affront to my masculine dignity! Do I look like the kind of guy who exfoliates and gets manicures? It’s bad enough my hands have become so slender and girlish from office work. I used to be a bike mechanic! I used to have big, meaty hands, grease-stained, with a smashed thumbnail, and I was proud of them!” But I just couldn’t. What if this guy does get manicures? What if he’s miserable enough as it is, stuck in a mall all day listening to Christmas songs, trying to get people excited about $50 skin creams? What if he’s supporting his poor sick mother?

“I’ll think about it,” I repeated, taking up my shopping bags and shuffling off, head down as if a chopper were overhead. I made it to the down escalator and didn’t look back.

dana albert blog