Shopping early for Christmas

I LIVE in a block of flats, and one day last week I came downstairs to go to work and caught a whiff of something spicy, not curry spicy but dried fruit spicy. “Ah!” I said, “Doris is baking something.” And she was.
Doris on the ground floor is a serious home baker. This chick doesn’t mess around. Some days when I get home after she’s been cooking up an afternoon storm, or at least a batch of melkterts, I nearly drown in my own spit as I climb the stairs, so tantalising are the aromas. Last week when I put my nose round her security gate and asked what she was baking, she said, “Christmas cakes.”
Christmas cakes? Christmas? Are you crazy, woman?
Then I remembered that I’d already seen my first Christmas-themed advertisement on television, and that was towards the end of August. And then someone at work pointed out that we have only nine more editions of the Vryheid Herald until Christmas. Nine! Verily, I say unto you, tempus bleeding fugit.

Then I thought, OK, this is the year; this is the year that having had this early reminder that Christmas was just round the corner, this is the year that I was NOT going to leave my Christmas shopping to the last frantic, hectic, knuckle-gnawing minute. This year I was going to behave completely out of character and be… wait for it… PRO ACTIVE!
I have never been so doff as to expect to enter a bank on the day before Christmas, and I presume that those who do enter a bank on the day before Christmas do so because they simply have no option. I think I would rather chew razor blades. Banks at month-end are one thing; banks on Christmas Eve are as painful as medieval dentists, just slower.
But every year I have left Christmas shopping, you know, gifts and groceries, until the last moment, and then on the 24th, I think that things will have died down by about mid afternoon, and I get to Church Street and it’s as if a swarm of human-sized locusts have swept through town.
My gift-buying obligations are relatively easy, or should be, but on the 24th of December they take on challenging proportions largely because I begin the task not knowing what I’m looking for. I expect to be inspired either by chance or by a caring sales assistant. A caring sales assistant? Are you crazy?
You will find at the best of times that caring sales assistants are few and far between. On the Eve of Christmas they take on an attitude that seems to indicate that you are more likely to steal something than pay for it. It’s as if the shops are being staffed by members of the old Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, they’re that grim.

No, this year I am going to start early but discrete prying into Doris’s (my Doris’s, not Baking Doris’s) needs and wants, so that come November, I shall pop into town, into Church Street, and purchase same, calmly and quietly. I shall reward myself that day with a nice little pub lunch, to include a couple of small ones. That will act as an incentive.
Further, I shall take the pressies home and wrap them calmly and quietly before the end of November, instead of the usual frenzied operation on the kitchen table, involving Sellotape, gift wrap and sharp scissors and blood, on the 24th, after I’ve threatened Doris (again, my Doris, not Baking Doris) that she enters the kitchen at her own risk.

Supermarkets can be trying on December 24. Let me rephrase that: Supermarkets can be hell on December 24. Bottlestores are… I dunno, how would you describe bottlestores? “Hell”, is too kind. They’re impossible, so all our supermarket and bottlestore buying should be done well before that date.
It means, of course, that we’ll have to decide now what we want. I don’t think there’s any point of going out to buy a turkey on December 24, when the only birds left at the bottom of the freezers, if there are any, look like road-kill. Are there mince pies and Christmas pud out on the shelves yet?
What do I need from the bottlestore? Doris (my Doris) drinks paraffin, so we’ll get her some paraffin (perhaps I should explain that her “paraffin” comes in a Richelieu bottle), I’ve got whisky I haven’t drunk yet, but I’d like to have some beer in the fridge ‘cos I predict a scorching summer, and we both like a drop of vino, so a couple of bottles of wine. And maybe, and this is just a thought, it would be the time to buy a bottle of something sparkly for the New Year, because you know what, the period between Christmas and New Year becomes manic in its passing.
You do not want to go to town between Christmas and New Year, trust me. You’d think that people have spent their last cent before Christmas… think again. Some Scrooge-like employers do not pay their staff before Christmas; they make them wait until the end of the month. It means that there is a frenzied attempt by these people to catch up with the rest of the festive masses. The result is Bedlam.
Nope, this Festive Season I’m not going to wait for the last minute. Hark the Herald Editor has spoken.