Ode to shopping

One of my favorite holiday traditions is coming up this week. It’s a little thing we like to call shopping day. My three sisters, my mom and I converge on a mall, armed with Christmas lists from all our spouses, our kids, and ourselves, and proceed to shop for each other until the sun goes down…and sometimes later.

At the end of the day, a huge portion of our Christmas shopping is done, and we’re confident that everything we bought will be the right color, the right size and the right brand. It’s a beautiful thing.

But to do this really well, you have to have a winning strategy.

First, go on a weekday, when you won’t be fighting the crowds. It’s well worth taking a day off, believe me.

Second, go in November — before Thanksgiving, if at all possible. The sales are already on, coupons are out, and nothing is sold out yet.

Third, choose the best location you can, and pretty much concentrate your efforts in that spot. You loose valuable shopping time flitting from mall to mall. We make one side trip, and one only, to a fabulous jewelry store nearby, where in one fell swoop, we generally do all the buying for each other.

We’ve been doing it for years now, and I get positively gleeful in the days leading up to it. More than the actual shopping, it’s the time with my mom and sisters I love. It gives us lots of time to talk and laugh and catch up. Living in a different town, I just don’t get enough of that.

I got so inspired just thinking about it today that wrote a little song about it.

With apologies to Bobby McFerrin…

Here’s a little song I wrote
Read the words and do take note
Don’t worry
Go shopping

In this world there’s lots of trouble
Find a sale and it bursts like a bubble
Don’t worry
Go shopping

Woo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hooooo
Hoooo Hoooo
Don’t worry, go shopping!

With my sisters I will go
Take my mom and there’s no woe
Don’t worry
Go shopping

Here’s the real version of
“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin.

Coming soon, a shopping haiku!