Appalachia Year

Today my red car took me all around town, scooping up last minute Christmas notions in the bitter cold, swiping the magnetic strip of my credit card with irresponsible abandon.

While I am certainly not immune to a love of Stuff, I hate shopping. I think it takes me back to that dread memory of my childhood - Running Errands with my mom. Blinking at the fluorescent lights above from the pinching metal seat of the shopping cart while my brother and sister ride along like tiny garbagemen for what seemed like hours while my mother painstakingly consulted her list and her coupons for every single aisle - it was enough to ruin the "magic" of retail for life. I can only be in Target for twenty minutes before I get light-headed and want to close my eyes and click my heels and get magically transported to a sunny porch. With a book and a stiff drink.

Then, I drove to work. In the restaurant's parking lot, with the engine off and my hands still on the steering wheel, a narcotic numbness washed over me from the manic afternoon of shopping. Why must there be so many goddamn things to buy? How am I gonna bounce back in 2009 from all the things I fake-bought for the holidays? How am I gonna afford to travel next fall without any savings? Why must my grad school stipend be so meager? Why do I let money problems affect me so much?

For my Christmas gift, Ana took this old steamer trunk, painted it, and decoupaged the interior with vintage maps, because Ana and I share one brain. And not to get all George Bailey on you, but this gift reminded me what a wonderful thing it is to have an overwhelming number of people in your life that require Christmas presents. Every single one of them a flash of warm light in this tragic, chaotic place. No gift felt like an obligation - every purchase or handmade bullshit that I've wrapped in optimistic paper has been fraught with anxiety because I want that gift to be a year's worth of my appreciation for their being alive.

And this is exactly the sort of overinvestment that makes Christmas afternoon such a huge disappointment.