There’s something about the Christmas season that leaves me with a split personality. I hate shopping. The only thing I ever want to do, once I set foot in a department store, is leave.
Yet I also have to confess that I love going into malls and shopping centers at Christmas time. I enjoy the scene, at least. Whether it’s Home Depot, the Square One Mall in Saugus or MarketStreet in Lynnfield, there’s something about the holiday season I just like.
I suppose it’s because some of my earliest childhood memories are of going into Boston — to Filene’s and Jawdins (as my mother would always say). Even in those days, before it got all fixed up, the shopping district in Boston was like Disneyland during the holidays.
And so was Central Square in Lynn back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with department stores such as T.W. Rogers, Burrows and Sanborn, Kennedy’s, Hoffman’s (not to be confused with the one in Cliftondale Square in Saugus) as well as some very nice clothing stores.
I also remember my uncle, J. Robert Cornell Jr., was the Chamber of Commerce Santa Claus. My mother and her sisters used to wait for him as he drove up in a firetruck, and then scream to the top of their lungs, “Woo Hoo, Santa!” and embarrass me to no end.
The value I place on these memories makes it mandatory that I go into malls and stores and see the scenes myself. I don’t think I’ve ever bought a Christmas present via Amazon.Com. One of the reasons I love what I do so much as that I enjoy being — as the song says — “in the room where it happens.” I love the action. If it’s happening, I want to be there. And that’s whether it’s Thanksgiving football or an ornately-decorated mall. I need to see it.
Two years ago, I got review tickets for “A Christmas Carol” at the North Shore Music Theater, and decided to take my son with me. We decided to get a quick bite to eat at the Northshore Mall’s food court before heading over to Beverly, and as I sat in the dining area, I looked around and saw all the red and green-motif decorations, all the people milling around with wrapping paper sticking out of their bags, with big-ticket items they were lugging around (some of them were taking up precious food court furniture by putting them on chairs).
The weather outside may have been frightful, but it sure beat going to the mall at the height of summer, when people walk around like zombies due to the heat. These people were alive, and there was an electricity about the place you don’t see any other time of the year.
So I enjoy the whole scene of Christmas shopping. I just don’t like to shop. Figure that one out.
For starters, I don’t like standing in line. Even at the weekly trip to the market, a checkout line can seem like Space Mountain. Lines get even longer at Christmas time. And they can be filled with the types of people who ask a thousand and one questions to the cashier, or, worse, act as if they’re mortally insulted when they find out they have to pay for what they’ve bought.
You know the type. They’d spent the last 10 minutes unloading their carts, waiting for the cashier to ring up the purchase, and then — and only then — fish their wallets out of their pockets or purses, and fumble around until they find the card they want to use. What? You didn’t know you’d have to pay for this? For heaven’s sake, could you at least have your cards out and ready?
And as much as I like seeing people hustle around stores with that holiday singleness of purpose, I don’t enjoy being among them. That’s one reason I tend to put off holiday shopping until I have no other alternative. I dread picking my way through throngs of people. I never shop on Saturdays because I know what that means.
I’ll shop. Or, rather, buy. But always at off-hours, and “Far from the Madding Crowd.” I don’t know whether that makes me a Scrooge with an asterisk or what it does. But I’ll bet I’m not alone.
