You know what I love to do? Shop in thrift stores. With 70% of our country’s GDP depending on consumer spending, that pretty much makes me persona non-grata.

The ugly truth is I am afflicted with the dreaded Lutheran Cheapass Syndrome or LCS. My husband has it too. It makes us very compatible, materialism-wise. It’s just that nine times out of ten we can rationalize ourselves out of most non-essential purchases. The only time we ever bother buying anything new is usually for someone else, like at Christmas.

Ah Christmas! How the birth of Christ manages to creep further and further into other holiday territories at the stores every year like some tinsel coated glacier is a phenomenon that can only be truly loathed by a person who has no intention of buying any of that crap.

I just think that having the fall bulb displays across the aisle from the giant glowing skulls across the aisle from the lighted shrine to the Griswalds sends a confusing message to customers.

I don’t particularly like Christmas shopping. Since my life is pretty much determined by my guilt factor, I stress about what to get each person that will rid me of my obligation to them with as little shame as possible. This stress is compounded by the said persons who will inevitably say, “Oh, I don’t really need anything. Don’t go to any trouble.” This is clearly a ruse, and I must now try to make whatever present I get them be a thoughtful one.

My husband shops with me, but he is basically not allowed to accomplish this task without supervision (because I’m a control freak). So together we will descend on whatever cluster of stores will provide the highest yield of required gifts in the shortest amount of time. I generally do all my shopping in one weekend in December.

This year will be our first year ever to host Christmas, and I’m planning something diabolical. No gifts. That’s right. Each family can exchange all they want with each other, but once they cross our threshold, their arms better only be laden with food and drink. We will watch Christmas movies, play board games, listen to holiday music and graze to our heart’s delight, but the only thing under the tree will be the cat fur coated tree skirt.

Is this wrong? Maybe. But the truth is I’m one of those annoying people who “doesn’t need anything” and I really wish that people “wouldn’t go to any trouble,”. The privilege of other people’s company to celebrate the birth of the Savior is all the gift I desire. You know, that and some kick-ass appetizers. Leave the leftovers if you feel guilty.

The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy is making the lives of millions of people downright miserable, yet it’s really hard to feel empathy when we’re still being bombarded with political attack ads. It was irritating enough before. Now, it’s just pisses me off.

I will be the last person to deny others their 1st amendment rights. In kinder words, I have had people pretty much call me a smut peddler. That’s their prerogative. Don’t like it? Don’t read it. So if some special interest group has the will and the money to push their agenda by smearing a political candidate that they don’t agree with, who am I to say they can’t?

The problem is BILLIONS (with a big ol’ capital B) of dollars are being siphoned into these superpaks that have no contact information, no brick and mortar address, and work under almost complete immunity from possible consequences if their statements are defamatory. Front Line did an awesome piece on them the other night.

So all that money is being spent simply to try to convince you and me about how bad a person is, while millions of people are facing devastation. Where is the sense in that? If these supposed non-profit groups had just taken a tiny percentage of all that political influence money and given it to a disaster relief fund, any disaster relief fund,  imagine how much more good that money would be doing right now instead of annoying the hell out of us.

It’s no wonder that there is no trust in our political system anymore. Public good has become a dirty turn of phrase in a climate of  “just me, right now.” That needs to change. We all live under the same rule of government on the same chunk of real estate. We all need to get along, because when the proverbial shit storm comes our way, we’re all we’ve got.

The political activist group that happens to serve your favorite flavor of Koolade isn’t going to come over and help you bail out your basement or make sure your grandma’s not freezing to death in her little apartment in the next state. It’ll be your neighbor, that crazy tea-partier, or her neighbor, that weird feminist with the two last names that does it. Ignore the rhetoric for now, and practice some good, old-fashioned civility.

Like many people, when my life as an adult becomes an overwhelming wave of obligations, I reminisce about the bucolic memories of my childhood. Halloween was fun.

I grew up in a trailer court. There were not a ton of advantages to that, but there were a few. One of them was trick-or-treating. I had twenty-eight adjacent neighbors, all in one short walk, all waiting to hand out candy.

I seem to remember we always trick-or-treated in the dark. It doesn’t seem like kids do that nowadays. My cousins from the country would come up and trick-or-treat with me. After my little sister got to toddler size, my mom would come with too. When it got to a point where I was too old to trick or treat, I would just take my sister out.

My dad would always go through our plastic pumpkins when we were done and pick out all the hard candy so we wouldn’t choke on it. This was a running theme with all my uncles too, so I can only speculate that someone in the family had a traumatic experience with choking that no one will talk about directly, but consider it some sort of cautionary tale nevertheless. He would always complain in the weeks that followed that me and my sister always ate the good stuff and left him the chaff candy (ie. no chocolate).

Ah, the candy. The peanut butter cups always went first, then the Hershey’s miniatures (Dad liked to eat the Mr. Goodbars and spit the nuts out, leaving them in a dish, hoping one of us in the house would accidentally start to eat them; then the joke would be on us. What some people will do for entertainment…), followed by the Kit Kats, M&M’s, Almond Joys, Mounds, Nestle’s Crunch, Baby Ruths, Snickers and Milky Ways.

The Butterfingers would usually go right before the non-milk chocolate candy. That would be the Smarties, the Toostie Rolls, the DumDum suckers (apparently if a stick was attached to the hard candy, the choking policy would be bypassed, presumably because the stick was some sort of retrieval device), Bazooka Bubble Gum, Starburst, Bitto Honey, and those weird maple nougat things with the peanut butter inside (which I love as an adult). The popcorn balls and various fruit were removed from the containers immediately and thoroughly inspected, even though we knew which neighbor gave them to us, because, “You never know these days.”

My favorite memory is the skeleton. My mom has always been the queen of resourcefulness. She saved all the stryrofoam containers that meat from the grocery store came on and used them to cut out bones. Then she carefully connected the bones with fishing line and hung the skeleton in the window. It was a good thirty inches tall and probably had a couple dozen pieces. It was just the coolest thing. It was so cool, that none of us would leave it alone, so inevitably the skeleton would get tangled. I seem to remember my mom carefully untangling it numerous times every year, but she still brought it out.

I should ask her if she still has it. Most of the meat at the store comes on either yellow or pink containers now. I suppose nowadays, people would be all freaked out to touch the skeleton if raw meat had touched it. Leave it to advancements in internal medicine to be a buzzkill.

Happy Halloween!