Pre-Gobble Shopping

Tomorrow is, of course, the turkey-tastic day of Thanksgiving. It's when we celebrate... some stuff, like the British invading the North American continent and subduing the natives with bribes of food and blankets. Okay, maybe I've got some of the details wrong, but I think that's essentially it.

I've never been a big fan of Thanksgiving as a "holiday"--it's as much a holiday to me as Easter or St. Patrick's day, in that the "origins" of the holiday hold little meaning to me on any sort of emotional level. It's pure commercialism, of course, but in that holidays like Thanksgiving are the backbone of American culture. So of course, it brings out the best in people.

I just got back from my first ever Thanksgiving meal shopping trip. Yeah, first-timer here; I always ended up with family and hell, I think some years I attended at least three holiday meals over a two-day period. But Makal and I are staying home this year. Even though we just got a car, fighting our way down 200+ miles of freeway from a major metropolitan area like Portland does not sound fun (getting back in time for him to go to work the next day: even less fun). Maybe if we had a working iPod adapter for the radio it would be feasible. Instead, we are more than content to hole up in our apartment and drink wine with our Thanksgiving ham.

Last night Makal mentioned that I might want to head to the store earlier than usual to beat the mad rush of last-minute shoppers who just got off work. So I grab our trusty reusable grocery bag and set out, shopping list in pocket, to get this over with. I returned home an hour later, carrying three very heavy bags with almost $50 worth of food... for just one meal. Aren't American holidays the greatest?!

And I totally thought that I would indeed be beating the mad rush of frustrated, bitter people looking ahead to their family meals with much chagrin. But no; by going mid-day, I simply found myself amongst hordes of old people doing their holiday shopping. Granted, most of these people looked friendly enough, but almost no one returned my smile as I passed them in an aisle. So if shoppers weren't going frustratingly slowly down the rakcs, they were barreling out of aisles at top speed, going too fast to make the quick turn to a perpendicular aisle and instead just glaring at me as I suddenly veered my cart out of the way of their wide turn.

The thing that frustrated me most about this shopping trip? The stuffing. I think stuffing is the bane of any last-minute Thanksgiving shopper's experience. Why does it sell out so quickly? If I were a grocery store (or the buying manager), I'd stock an end-cap 10 feet high with boxes of Stove Top. In reality, I wandered the store for 5 minutes before asking a stock person where the stuffing was. He said there was some by the turkey display and the rest was with the bread. The stuff by the turkeys? "Gourmet" stuffing with raspberries or cranberries; the sort of stuffing nobody really wants to buy until it's the last minute and they're already standing there for the turkeys. The normal display of stuffing, however, was not to be found (I think I spent close to 15 minutes looking for that); I assumed they were already sold out.

Of course, it was only once my purchases were being scanned that I saw a man walk up to a nearby register... carrying eight boxes of Stove Top stuffing.