I was fond of the Christmas season as a young adult. It was still fun and festive. My friends and I would meet and go together to midnight mass. There was always a crowd at that mass, and inevitably we well-bred young folks gave up our seats to the elderly folks who arrived after we did. You would think that after the first time I had to stand for an hour during mass, I would learn to wear boots instead of pumps to the service. Oh, no. It was Christmas. It was a festive time. I dressed accordingly. After mass, my friends and I would trek through the neighborhood stopping off at one another’s homes where our parents had spreads of Christmas goodies for all of us. Between stops, we had half-hearted snowball fights—half-hearted because we all wore our good “Sunday go to Meeting Clothes.” At the last home of the night—early morning, to be accurate—we had a group breakfast, and then we scattered to our own homes to thaw out and then sleep in on Christmas morning. Fun and festive.

I wasn’t quite as fond of the Christmas season as a young parent. I wasn’t the one having all the fun anymore. I was the one providing all the fun and excitement. I was the one convincing a kid not to scream and cry on Santa’s lap so the photographer could take a decent picture. O joy. I had no idea how much work was involved. It looked so easy when my mother did it—the decorating, sending out the Christmas cards, the gift shopping, the grocery shopping, the cooking—so much cooking—and the baking (Did I mention that I cannot bake worth a darn?). And then there was the gift wrapping, the gift hiding where Firstborn and Little Brother couldn’t find them, being a kid wrangler for my two boys who couldn’t sit still during Christmas Eve service, and cleaning up the mess after the Christmas morning gift unwrapping frenzy. After a few years of this, I stopped looking forward to the Christmas season. Christmas equaled stress. I began to dread it.

I believe I know when I became a Christmas Curmudgeon. It was the last year we had a huge live tree—one of Firstborn’s friends dubbed it “The Christmas Sequoia.” On Christmas morning, I looked under the tree to see that Baby Jesus was missing from the manger. I alerted Macho Guy and the boys, and the hunt was on. We eventually found Baby Jesus behind a sofa in the family room—gnawed almost beyond recognition. The perpetrator of this desecration, our American Eskimo devil dog, had gone into hiding. We flushed him out and scolded him but the damage was irreversible. Of all the figurines under the tree, why did that wicked little monster choose to chew on Baby Jesus? I was appalled. It was sacrilege, no doubt about it. The boys, who adored the evil four-legged assassin, broke up laughing at what they felt was the absurdity of the situation. It was about then that I snapped. It was Baby Jesus’ birthday and instead of receiving a gift, he was chewed up by an unrepentant four-legged, white-furred spawn of Satan.

It struck me then that this incident was only one indication that the true spirit of Christmas was missing in action, replaced somewhere along the line by a secular white-bearded icon in a red suit who came down the chimney to become a symbol of crass commercialism. A holy day had become a holiday instead.

Until Christmas is once again the way it used to be, the way it should be, and the way it was meant to be, just call me Scroogette. Bah! Humbug!

To be continued next week.

Not me. I was born without the shop-till-you-drop gene. I often wonder if that reflects on my femininity somehow.

I only shop when it becomes so absolutely necessary that I can no longer avoid doing so. Case in point: Macho Guy’s $100 challenge.

A number of years ago, when Firstborn and Little Brother were still school age, a T-shirt and jeans—sweatshirt and jeans in cold weather—were my eminently practical uniform of the weekday, and I had a few Sunday-Go-To-Meeting Outfits that I cycled through. One day, which happened to be the first day of the month, Macho Guy handed me a one-hundred-dollar bill.

ME: [eyes wide as dinner plates] What’s this for?

MACHO GUY: I want you to buy some new clothes. I’m tired of seeing you wear the same old stuff all the time.

ME: What’s wrong with wearing jeans and T-shirts? I’m raising two boys. You know what they’re like. I’d be crazy to wear good clothes around them.

MACHO GUY: It’s the good clothes I’m talking about. Look, I appreciate that you don’t spend a lot on yourself, but you need to get something new.

ME: But I don’t need anything new.

MACHO GUY: Yeah, you do. Let me put it this way. If you don’t spend this hundred on some new clothes by the end of the month, I’ll take back the hundred and I’ll take all your clothes out back and burn them and you’ll have nothing to wear.

ME: You wouldn’t dare.

MACHO GUY: Try me.

[Flash forward one month.]

MACHO GUY: Did you spend the hundred yet?

ME: No. Why?

MACHO GUY: Today’s the last day of the month. You’d better get your butt to the mall or tomorrow you’ll be a nudist.

He had that really macho don’t-mess-with-me look in his eyes that told me he meant business. I decided it was not in my best interest to mess with him. I took my butt to the mall.

My timing could not have been worse. I arrived to find a mall-wide sale going on. O joy. The place was a credit-card-flashing zoo, just the sort of bargain-manic mob I wanted to avoid. I shopped in haste, spending the hundred bucks on coordinated pieces I could mix and match to create several outfits, and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I figured my new duds would definitely placate Macho Guy, and I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to shop again for what I hoped was a long, long while.

The fact is that I don’t understand the appeal of shopping. I can’t work up any enthusiasm for it. I’d rather do just about anything else.

Grand openings don’t entice me. Sales leave me cold. Black Friday is just another day.

I do make an exception for books. I love to shop for books. I can spend countless hours browsing in a bookstore, and I have. Bookstores for me are equivalent to Godiva chocolate boutiques.

For some unknown reason, clothes shopping doesn’t do it for me. No one will ever refer to me as a clotheshorse. Of course, it doesn’t help that current fashion trends lean toward the coyote ugly. I open women’s magazines—MORE, for example—to see fashion editors gushing over the latest trends. Are they serious? Are they that easy to please? Are they color blind?

More often than not, the latest trends embrace unflattering and uninspired designs featuring discordant fabric patterns in clashing colors too bright or too sickly drab. One look at them and I put off shopping—dieting too. Call me a fashion curmudgeon if you will, but I refuse to starve myself to fit into an outfit that appears to be stitched together with fabric scraps from a ragbag.

I don’t even bother shopping for cute shoes. I can’t buy them. Shoe manufacturers decreed that I am not allowed to wear cute shoes because I have wide feet. I have very wide feet. I have the widest wide feet, actually—doublewide to be exact.

Easy Spirit shoe stores used to be the place to shop if you had very narrow or very wide feet. That was Easy Sprit’s claim to fame. I used to be able to find attractive shoes there in various colors in my size and width. Not anymore. The Easy Spirit honchos decided, in their finite wisdom, to manufacture doublewide shoes in black only. Wide feet are not allowed to wear colorful shoes. Wide feet are a serious inconvenience to shoe manufacturers and do not deserve colorful shoes. Wide feet must wear black shoes and look as if they are perpetually in mourning. As a consequence, I wear a lot of black outfits so the rest of me also looks as if perpetually in mourning—or like a New Yorker.

I’m not much for jewelry shopping either. Expensive jewelry has never been a turn-on for me. I’d rather wear inexpensive fun pieces or no jewelry at all, except for my wedding ring, which thrills Macho Guy no end. He’s the envy of several buddies whose wives keep various jewelry stores in business.

Unfortunately for non-shoppers like me, we are fast approaching the stress-filled holiday gift-shopping season. Soon it will be November and there comes Black Friday, the shoppers’ and retailers’ high holy day. As I mentioned earlier, Black Friday is just another day to me. You won’t find me camping in the middle of the night outside a store that advertises the sale of a limited number of Christmas specials—first come, first serve—when its doors open before dawn. I’ll be at home all Thursday night and Black Friday morning, warm and toasty in my bed, and visions of sugarplums will not be dancing in my head.