How’s your shopping going?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Basically done. The older I get, the more I dislike this holiday.
I bought stuff for my son, my dad, and my g/f. Most of it was used: I think grand total of new stuff bought was less than $75.00.
I’m also quite sick of Christians so I really don’t feel comfortable pretending I care about their sky-god myths.
Perfect.
Have a great holiday at the cabin, BooMan.
I’m giving very few gifts this year, so yeah, I’m done shopping.
Today is travel day for me, 6 hours of driving coming up to visit family in burned-up Ventura CA. Hopefully this year’s motel has better wifi than the place i stayed last year.
I’m a no nonsense person when it comes to shopping. I get in there to get what I need and I’m out. I am also not the biggest fan of gift giving. I’m not cheap, I just hate the obligation to purchase things people may or may not need. Market economies would definitely collapse under a world full of me’s because we wouldn’t buy much. Shopping is essentially done though. Girlfriend and I don’t exchange gifts and typically buy stuff we need as a joint gift to each other (we bought a floor rug last year).
I want to send the best Christmas and holiday wishes to all who come to the Booman Tribune. I also want to thank Martin and his family for hanging in there to be a beacon to us all year long. It’s the best place to learn and also share.
My shopping is finished. My wrapping and sending and cleaning are also finished. My middle son came home last night from Charlotte, my brother came in from Las Vegas, and my sis and her daughter will come in from California on Christmas Day. My two other sons are local, so they’ll also be here.
Gifts and good food are great, but family is the best.
Merry Christmas to all, and let’s keep hope alive in 2018!
My take on “The Holidays?”
As William Burroughs said over and over again, the contemporary calendar is just another control system, like that of the Mayan calendar.
Know when most people are going to be “happy,” when they will spend money even though they cannot really afford to do so, and you’ve got them in your pocket. Simultaneously keep them frightened and you’ve got that pocket zipped up tight.
AG
Mostly ok. Report from the field: It’s crazy time on the roads, around stores – Costco was unbelievable. I had to park so far away I’m still scraping the seaweed off the wagon. Unprecedented. If we’re any indication retail sector should be very happy.
All done. Ready to wrap.
Mostly done, surprisingly. We’ll probably dispense with gift wrap this year. One more to buy and we’re good to go. Main thing is everyone is now either healthy or well on the road to recovery. I’ll call that the best gift of all.
Almost everything purchased and wrapped. The one exception is the kosher mezuzzah I want to purchase for my parents. Have to find a local rabbi.
Didn’t get into gift giving until later in life. Found the commercial aspect of the holiday distasteful (still do) but came to appreciate the joyousness that goes with an open heart. There aren’t many better ways to exercise one’s heart than through giving.
We have a blended holiday. My parents are Jewish (my mom religious/agnostic and my dad agnostic/atheist). My adult children are half Jewish, half Catholic (one totally agnostic, the other deistic in an undefined sort of way). My wife and I are Jewish Muslims (yes, both). Our little one hasn’t figured out his path yet.
Happy holidays to everyone! :0)
What a great gift idea for your parents.
What’s it like, being a Jewish Muslim? I’ve always maintained that I could be a Christian Muslim, since the only criterion for being a Muslim is to say and mean the Shihadah, which I have no problem with. No one seems to take me seriously, although I take heart that my fellow Episcopalian Madeleine Albright has said she will register as a Muslim if Muslims are required to register.
That’s very cool, Dunyazzad. Not sure what it would mean to register. I mean, it’s a religion for God’s sake! Not a badge to wear on one’s lapel. I wish the orange buffoon had an ounce of empathy or insight.
My experience of Islam was that it came to me like a huge, unexpected surprise. It has such a bad reputation in the west and being Jewish doesn’t help. I came in through the door called Sufism, which is Islamic mysticism. As I learned to taste God energy (believing has zero meaning; the mind can’t grok God), I came to understand Judaism for the first time. In fact I discovered that the services I’d found so incredibly boring all my life are actually rich with experience and meaning once one knows how to access what’s coming through.
These skills are not taught in our culture or most others. Most Muslims live in at least partial ignorance of the beauty of their own religion. But why should that be a surprise? I was a Jew living in ignorance just as most Christians live in ignorance too.
In my experience, there’s really no difference between religions. They’re methods or means of connecting to the unity, the oneness, the light — that some call God. If one makes too much fuss about the path rather than about the place it’s trying to take us, it creates a false god, yet another form of idolatry in a world full of idols.
Thank Dog for online shopping.The store crowds are always hideous this time of year.
Did my shopping in about two hours online last week, and everything arrived more or less on time. I did get a head start in an overseas trip after Thanksgiving. Husband took care of ordering gifts for the grandkids (also online). Today I made serious inroads on the preparations for Christmas dinner. Contemplating whether to make eggnog.
We finished a little while ago. Although today wasn’t for gifts, it was for tasty Christmas Dinner desserts. As a Christian myself, I’m not wild about the commercialism, but I do feel great happiness and satisfaction in the choosing of he right gift for a loved one. Their enjoyment is what makes it fun. Of course, one can do that any time (and I sometimes do), but it is good to have a time set aside to remind us of that.
It’s a secular holiday for our family, but we do enjoy special food and gift giving, mostly for the children. Oldsters have enough stuff
Whether Christmastime or a birthday or some other occasion I share your pleasure in finding just the right gift for a loved one. Many gifts from past years still bring pleasure, especially since the gift giver is no longer with us.
Even for someone who doesn’t celebrate this as a religious holiday, the commercialization is really grating and disgusting. We call it the Walmart War on Christmas.
Even when I do no formal gift buying, wrapping, etc. (how it’s been for a number of years), I still bake/make lots of treats for gifts. It finally dawned on me that as with gifting over the course of the year, most of it ends up concentrated for Christmas. Which is exhausting. So, I’m giving out homemade gift cards for the favorite treats — carrot cake, blintzes, pie, and butter dinner rolls. That way the recipients can have it when they most want it. Still doing the Christmas cookies and fudge because nobody wants that in July. (Might have to come up with some way to retrain them on this point.)
. . . cry for assholes . . . ‘
Sometimes Roy at alicublog is peerless at getting succinctly right to the essence of things.
Seems Trump’s loons are in the throes of celebrating “victory” (including national teevee ad campaign that started today) in a “war” only they were fighting, that being the war on the non-existent “war on Christmas”.
One thing I noticed this year in my part of the world: last year after Dolt 45’s electoral college victory, I would get greeted with “Merry Christmas” from store clerks etc., and it always sounded so aggressive – the words would be practically spat out and there seemed to be a bit of sneer on most of their faces. This year, there was considerably less of that. Our mileage may different, and I seriously doubt it means the fever has broken. But maybe things are calming a little.
Yep. The last two years I’ve posted cartoons on facebook expressing how false the WoC is. This year only one (1) posting showed up. The tide is turning and Trump is “a day late and a dollar short” on this one.
. . . sounds about right for rightwingnut assholes.
Total elapsed time door to door: three hours and a bit. Cost: ~$400, less groceries.
. . . before declaring victory against his own side in this ridiculous, made-up “conflict”. digby has the goods.
Get a load of those “Holiday” tweets!
(On moral and, well, just “ick” grounds, the rest is actually even worse. But the howling hypocrisy of the war on [fake] “War on Christmas” victory dance is really just too rich.)