This year, I made it a point to do all of my Christmas shopping the old-fashioned way, which is to say I actually left home to do it.
Oh, sure. I could have easily found the gifts I wound up purchasing online, maybe even at a lower price. Free shipping would have brought those purchases to my doorstep. I could have done in the space of a few minutes online what it took me hours to do in person.
But why cheat myself, especially during the Christmas season?
I could have bought the granddaughters’ toys online, but then I would not have seen the guy in a T-shirt that read, “I don’t need Google. My wife knows everything.”
Online, I would not have encountered a lady with a black-and-tan dachshund in her shopping cart and told her how much he reminded me of my sweet Dooley, two years gone now. The rules for service animals in public spaces are greatly relaxed these days. I’m in favor of that. Seeing them always makes me smile.
Ordering from Amazon would have denied me the opportunity of helping a blind man find the topical cream he was looking for. I had overheard him ask a store clerk where he might find it. She was busy with a line of customers, so she said, “It’s on the back wall over there.”
“I’m blind,” he said. “Can’t somebody show me?”
I could, so he took my sleeve and together we found the shelf that contained the topical creams. I gave him the run-down on the sizes, brands and prices and handed him his choice.
He thanked me and went about our separate ways. It was a casual reminder that while hardly any of us can solve the big problems in the world, we can sure solve a lot of little ones, if we are present in that moment of need. It’s a privilege.
Online, I could have immediately found the specific toy the 10-year-old had on her list instead of wandering up and down the aisles of the toy section.
But then, I would never have bumped into an old childhood friend, Mr. Potato Head. He was much as I remembered him, except that this particular Mr. Potato Head also had Mrs. Potato Head parts, so you could mix-and-match. I was eager to rush home and share with my conservative friends on social media that today’s Mr. Potato Head can be a drag queen or transgender, another salvo in the War of Christmas. This, too, makes me smile.
They still make the Slinky, too. I picked up the box and the jingle began to play in my head:
It’s Slinky! It’s Slinky!
For fun, it’s a wonderful toy.
It’s Slinky! It’s Slinky!
It’s fun for a boy and a girl.
Like a lot of folks, I have a Christmas songs playlist on Spotify, but the stores have their own playlists. So, when “Mary Did You Know?” played over the store intercom, I groaned under my breath: The Gambler mansplaining the Magnificat to Mary. Yeah, I’m pretty sure Mary knew. Stick to Lucille, Kenny.
The song put me in a cynical frame of mind, so when I heard a brassy-voiced girl bleating “I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas,” I remember reading once that hippos kill more humans than lions, and began to hope she got her wish.
The song is what is described as a novelty song. Every generation has them. When I was a child, it was “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” Somehow that one has fallen off all known radio playlists, even though it is no sillier or annoying than the hippo song.
Online, you can see images of grand Christmas Decorations – Rockefeller Center, The White House Christmas Tree, etc. – but if you want to take in the downtown decorations in your town, you have to leave the house. Oldtimers recall when a trip to see the downtown shop windows decorated for Christmas was a big part of the holiday. That tradition still exists today in the shops and on the street corners downtown.
You can donate to worthy causes online, but you have to be physically present to watch a little kid feeding change, one coin at a time, into a Salvation Army kettle like he was playing the slots at the Beau Rivage.
I could go on.
Think of all the things you miss when your shopping is confined and your senses constrained by the technology of the day.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut understood this.
“We are put on earth to fart around,” he said. “Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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