The presents I ordered last week on Black Friday have started arriving. On the one hand, yay! Presents! On the other hand, I can’t help but feel, This is it? This is all I ordered? And it cost *how much*?! Every year, the dollar shrinks a little more, and my family’s agreed upon limits* just don’t go as far as they used to.
There’s also the problem of seeing something you’ve been wanting for awhile, but weren’t willing to pay full price for (for example, the Superman Returns dvd hasn’t dropped under $20 since it was released….until Black Friday!), but you can’t buy it for yourself now, not during “holiday shopping” season. And you just know the price will jack itself back up as soon as Christmas is over. Phooey.
Of course, these are all first-world problems. We have roofs over our heads, food on our tables, and usually family and/or friends to spend the holidays with. Everything else is gravy, but the incessant holiday commercials can make it easy to forget that. Someday I hope I can rise above my petty material desires and spend my holiday cash on charities and donations while urging others to do the same with whatever they’d spend on me, but if there is such a day, I suspect it’s very far from today.
*People sometimes ask why we have dollar limits on our Christmas spending–it makes more sense if you know that I used to spend $300 on each person in my immediate family before they reined me in with limits. I still cheat, though.