Christmas Shopping - or Reasons to be Fearful, Part 1

I have blogged recently about the merits of making stuff for Christmas over buying stuff in shops. I cannot recommend this more highly.

To start at the beginning, I went into Poole today to buy some drugs as I was woken up this morning at about 0130hrs by the teeth in my upper jaw fighting to get out of my head - and such is the irritation it always takes me at least five minutes to work out this is actually not specifically a dental problem, it's a sinus problem.

So, off I trot to Boots to buy something to knock it on the head, along with so many other bits for good measure that the very nice lady at the proper medicine counter, where I paid, took about five minutes to explain what to do with everything - including taking plenty of water with the diarrhoea tablets - at which point I had to explain I didn't actually have diarrhoea at the moment, however my 'be prepared' genes take over and try to cover all possible angles the moment things start running out of places they generally shouldn't and so on.

Anyhoo, the upshot of this was I got to witness the vast throngs of people doing, I imagine, mostly Christmas shopping (or going to Boots for drugs like me).

It amuses me that the commonly dredged-up Dickensian 'Christmas Carol' view of festive events is that everyone is chirpy and cheerful at this time, apart from that old git Scrooge. That may well have been the case in Victorian Britain, although I have my doubts, however we've properly turned that on its head, haven't we?

Next time you go out into hordes of shoppers just hang fire for 30 seconds and actually check out whether or not people are actually enjoying themselves. I can promise you the majority are not. I don't want to go into another rant about how exceptionally bloody rude a lot of people are, common courtesies or even the acknowledgement of other people a distant memory in their zombified state, so instead let's get to the root of the problem - I see this, very clearly, as the overwhelming cult of consumerism.

So, I've already covered the 'do we need to buy stuff' and the 'let's be creative' angles to some degree, however if we do need to buy stuff - and to some degree that's a given for must of us - maybe we should make a little more effort to use our nice little local shops (if we have them), and to be nicer to people out on the streets by acknowledging they exist in some small way. (Or use the internet, I suppose, which is a nice cop-out because it pretty much removes the hassle factor altogether.)

For example, the cult of consumerism tells us bigger shops are cheaper and have more choice, however deep-down I know that's not always true, as they will often charge more. And if I ever want something really specific - say a nice bunch of flowers or a specific 'widget' I'll go to a local florist or little hardware shop because they'll actually serve me up what I'd like. And that highlights the fact that I know the vast majority of times I'll get better service in a small shop - in fact if I use it often they might even recognise me or even know my name. These are all things we've lost to some degree into the cult of consumerism. We are certainly socially poorer as a result.