We spent most of today in a big shopping outlet. I feel like I’ve been running the gauntlet in a bumper-car arena, for hours and hours. My arms hurt from being scratched and scraped by frantic scurrying shoppers with pointy-edged packages, and bumped and battered by laden frenzied people bearing large bundles and bags and waving them wildly like pinwheels in the wind.

They each and all needed a space around them. A safety bubble, for their own sakes and for the sakes of anybody near them. Some kind of buffer.

In a shopping outlet the weekend before Christmas, however, there wasn’t much free space to be found.

Those people with the huge VW Beetle-sized strollers were out in full force again.

Why do so many old men just stand aimlessly in the middle of the aisle? Couldn’t they at least move to one side so people could get through?

And if you are out shopping and it’s VERY crowded and you meet some friends and wish to play ‘catch-up,’ it would be nicer both for you and for the others if you’d GET OUT OF THE WAY AND GO TO THE FOOD BAR or something. Anything except what so many were doing, namely: standing in the middle of the aisle with the aimless old men, blocking traffic.

And why in the name of all that is holy would a person bring a DOG to a crowded outlet? There must have been hundreds of dogs there today. Big, medium, tiny. . . . you name it and it was there. Taking up space. Pooping on the floors. Growling at little kids in the huge strollers. Causing massive allergic reactions. Twisting around in the leash. Obviously miserable, and wishing they were back home chained to the doghouse and lapping up their own vomit. None of the dogs wore the ‘service dog’ sign. They were just somebody’s ‘widdle babykins’ and “wanted” to go shopping with Mommy and Daddy. Right. Poor dogs.

Kids who open box after box of toys and sit in the aisles playing with them should be hung upside down in the store window and flogged.

Oooooh, I’m witchy tonight. Can you tell? You can? Oh. I’m sorry.

I love crowds. Mobs, however, are another story altogether. Mobs are scary. Mobs are dangerous. Mobs do stupid things. Desperate shoppers in groups are not crowds. They are mobs. And with no burgermeister to lead them to a single Frankensteinian goal, these mobs push and shove and flail their way through a mall like piranha through a herd of wading cows.

I went shopping today. Hopefully I won’t be back till next year. In the meantime, I’m content to sit home and click on Amazon and Ebay and Half.com, with a smile on my face and my ear peeled towards the doorbell, which will announce the elfin delivery of the majority of my Christimas shopping.

Don’t these people make lists before they leave the house?

Anyway, we’re home now and I’m going to go to the kitchen in a minute and maybe make some grilled cheese. It sounds good on this cold night. And then I get to wrap presents! I LOVE doing that.

There’s really not much connected with Christmas that I DON’T love, in fact.

Maybe some of you had noticed that little fact already. . . . .