Christmas Shopping Sucks

For many people, Christmas shopping is a yearly pain in the ass. I am no different from other people in this aspect of my life. Like everyone else I wait until the last minute, then on Christmas Eve I rush out to Wal-Mart and buy everyone on my list gifts in one frantic shopping spree. Of course by this time most of the good gifts are sold out, so I end up having to settle for bags of Christmas candy as a suitable gift. Everyone likes candy, right? Its fail proof and it takes zero thought. I remember one year I was so broke, that I had no other choice than to buy my whole family gifts on like 20 bucks. I felt pretty bad, but I realized that my family doesn’t expect much from their gifts from me, so that made it a little better. Nowadays though, my family doesn’t even give me a clue what they want. “Me? Uh…Gee, I dunno. Get me something nice.” Sweet. To let you know, I am terrible at coming up with gifts for people when they don’t tell me what they want. So this leaves me in a dilemma every year. But I have decided on a course of action. Why worry about finding the perfect gift when every store is chock full of cop-out gifts. I was just in K-Mart today, once again clueless as to what to get for my family for Christmas. Then I wandered over to the discount Christmas music bin. It was full of crappy Christmas music that few people would enjoy. One title that stood out was, “A Redneck Christmas.” I know for a fact that no one on my list of people to buy gifts for would enjoy such a CD, but hey, if you put no effort into putting together a list of things you would like, then I will put no effort into picking out a gift. So according to my new rule, “A Redneck Christmas,” is fair game as a Christmas gift. Also, since I live in Jackson Hole, there is an abundance of touristy gift shops, many overpriced, but there are plenty of affordable t-shirts. One kind of shirt that I have always wanted to buy for someone are those nature shirts. The ones that will say the name of a place, such as Jackson Hole, WY, and then have large, painting style, pictures of wild animals. A good example would be a wolf howling at the moon or a majestic bald eagle soaring over some snow capped mountains. The only people I have ever seen wear these shirts are poor kids in middle school and fat ladies in their fifties. I think that you know the kind of shirt that I am alluding to. My favorite one that I saw depicted the faces of an all-star line up of wild animals, a moose, an elk, an eagle, and of course a wolf. It was pretty sweet. I am laughing right now just thinking about it. I think that this would make an excellent gift for anyone who doesn’t throw me bone as to what they want for Christmas. So if you know for a fact that you are on my list and you told me to get you something nice for Christmas, it may interest you to know that in my opinion a wolf t-shirt is very nice.