Presents of Mine

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Houses and trees twinkle with strings of blinking lights, a thin blanket of snow covers the ground, and a news headline yesterday announced a heated debate as to whether Santas' beards should be real. (I'm thinking only if it's the real Santa, but who cares what some Jew thinks?)

Mall parking lots are packed, and the stores are enjoying a steady stream of shoppers laden with shopping bags and threadbare credit cards. My view this year, for the first time ever, is from the business side of the register, and what I've learned is almost as shocking to me as the news of fake Santa beards is to others: most people are shopping for themselves! A few engage in the old ruse of taking items into the fitting room because "my sister is exactly my size," but most don't even bother. At most, they express some guilt when they decline the offer of a gift box. "I shouldn't really be shopping for myself," they say, as if this purchase is just a tiny aberration in an otherwise selfless and generous day. Funny, when I peer into their other shopping bags, there's not a gift box in sight.

An observant and well indoctrinated Jew, I've always adhered to the teachings of the Old Testament, which doesn't even recognize Christmas, and, even if it did, would probably still hold that individual birthdays are the most important days of the year, especially when it comes to gift giving. The revisions that were implemented some two thousand years ago may have been well-intentioned (in a spiritual sense), but let's face it, if everybody has to share just one day out of 365, it's only natural that many folks are going to focus mainly on their own haul. Show me someone who prefers to watch others open all the presents while she sits empty handed except for the video camera and I'll show you a mall Santa with a real white beard.

As far as I'm concerned, the entire Christmas shopping season was a scheme cooked up by biblical merchants (oh no! could it have been the Jews?) and was never really intended to cater to the odd soul who actually believes it is better to give than to receive. It's every man for himself out there; heck, even we Jews get into the spirit, taking an occasional detour into the stores in December to buy ourselves a few presents. It's always nice to have a new outfit for the movie and Chinese dinner on the 25th.

Yep, Santas shave and people shop for themselves in December. It's how things were meant to be.