CityView Magazine

12 | November/December • 2014 By Bill McFadyen How To Buy For Christmas M y Christ-based family knows the reason for the season, as they say. We have always made efforts while swimming in the midst of the main stream to sustain its sanctity. In both my childhood and aer becoming the pa- triarch of three children, we have always sought the Church in the Advent Sundays leading to Christmas and on Christmas Eve. Nevertheless, my clan must acknowledge at least some contrib- utory negligence for the trend toward the secu- larization of Christmas. My sweet mother stands on the front line of that familial guilt. Christmas preparations for her began in earnest some- time around July, when Katherine Wheeler and she would perspire through the oppressive Atlanta summer heat pick- ing out Christmas inventory at the Trade Show for the benefit of the Holmes Electric Gi Shop. Mother would come home four pounds lighter from the loss of water-weight and hum- ming carols about dashing through snow that had obvious- ly melted upon contact with her clothes. By the first day of school, my two brothers and I had started a written tally de- termining which of us had the most presents wrapped so far. It was updated weekly in September and October and even- tually daily. ere was always a nativity scene resting behind the Halloween pumpkin. We boys were fully adult before we discovered that anksgiving was a stand-alone holiday, not just the rest of the world's Christmas kick-off. Still, my mother's form of Christmas readiness, while ad- mirably zealous, was a bit disheveled. Each year there came the time to start delivering gis to friends and for grouping family gis according to their ultimate unwrapping destination. Invariably, we discovered unmarked ones that had to be opened to determine for whom they were in- tended and subsequently re-wrapped. Natu- rally, fights ensued among the brothers as we determined who got to open the first unmarked McFadyen's Musings package. Another fight transpired if the eventual number of unmarked packages was not divisible by three. True Christmas readiness became a McFadyen family trait only through the broadening of our gene pool via mar- riage. My sister-in-law, Mona, worked hard all the years of my mother's life to hide her disdain for mom's methods. Mona's preparation begins around July, just as did Mom's in her prime, only Mona's is not in the form of actually buying anything in July. Once each future recipient's gi has been cataloged, Mona then begins an elongated shopping process through price comparison, calculations of drive-time-to-pur- chase-location verses UPS shipping charges, and projections of item availability as a ratio of local demand to world-wide inventory levels. Come Cyber Monday evening, you will find her sitting at home with arms crossed wondering what time lunch starts on Christmas Day. Life changes indefinably once pinion feathers are set and fledglings fly the nest. One of those drastic changes for me in- volved Christmas, as I knew it. Hawaii is a paradise. e two years I lived there aer college were my most free. One thing Hawaii does not offer, though, is the magic of Christmas. It is wholly unfair to ask of Santa to bundle his cultivated fatty layers against frigid temperatures all year long, traverse the continental United States in the cold of one December night, leave Seattle bound for an 80-degree Oahu, and about-face it to Alaska before going home. Can you imagine being told you are flying to Hawaii from the wintery continental US; that you are visiting every island, but only staying for the blink of an eye before you fly out again to Anchorage? Christmas on Maui is nothing more than a day off from work. I returned home permanently in 1987. Participation in the family retail business diluted my Christmas enthusiasm to some degree too. Sales projections, the re-stocking of inven- tory, and prospect-to-sales conversions (all compressed into five or so weeks of a selling frenzy) served to eclipse the won- der of the Miracle Birth that I felt being back home would in- spire. Over the years, the passage of time from Black Friday to We boys were fully adult before we discovered that thanksgiving was a stand- alone holiday, not just the rest of the world's christmas kick-off.

• Cover