Five wise, five foolish shoppers

"There's an old joke: two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other says, 'Yeah, I know, and such small portions.' Well, that's how I feel about life --- full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's over much too quickly" (Annie Hall).

Christmas is like that too. It's a deplorable, materialistic, Madison Avenue-driven, greed-inducing, decadent orgy that we Christians all ought to boycott --- and I never have enough time to finish my shopping.

"Bricks without straw?" cried the Israelites, when their Egyptian overlords said that from now on they had to fetch their own straw to make the pyramid bricks --- and without slacking off from their regular work.

As I write, it's Tuesday, December 18th, and I have precisely one gift for my 18-year-old son and one for my 13-year-old daughter (a Sally Hansen "Spa Crème Hair Removal Wand"; she thinks she has a moustache). I got a calendar for my son who's in prison. An hour ago, I phoned the facility and they said it can't be larger than 8" x 10", so I just measured it and it's 8.5" x 11'.

There were five wise virgins and five foolish virgins headed to a wedding. The wise ones had started looking for sales in September, snapping up gifts at their ease. The foolish ones haven't learned their lesson after 55 Christmases.