Quote of the day

I shopped today. Not for gifts, but for fruit and vegetables and Obama-esque arugula. There were 500 zillion people in every single store. There is no bloody way we are staring a Great Depression in the face, no way at all.

I’m going to take a Xanax now.

~Wendy Sullivan

I've braved a few visits to Target, the grocery store, the gas station...and I concur. It's bloody madness out there. The piles of snow don't help, but they don't seem to hinder shoppers any more than the recession has--at least here. Lines are long, people are typically hurried, harried, and rude, and maneuvering parking lots is an exercise in patience.

Fortunately, other than printing a few photos, I think we're about done with the gifting aspect of Christmas.

The irony here, of course, is that the more people who give up on this hyper-Dickensian consumerist version of Christmas, the more economically ugly the season will become. In other words, the closer we get to actually celebrating the True meaning of Christmas (even the secular true-meaning, i.e. love, family, lots of little glittering lights) the worse it is for our economy.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Do we shop like mad and spend outrageously for the collective well-being? or do we cut back, live more simply, give the gift of our time rather than go in to debt, and let the retailers wail? Or, do we as a nation and a people reevaluate the definition of "collective well-being"?