Brighten up 'Black Friday'

Christmas shopping, though, is something else. Christmas shopping can be magical, and I have three memories in particular of times when it was exactly that. The first was of a Christmas I spent in a little village on the west coast of Scotland in 1964. The family I was visiting made up in talent, cheer, and humor for what it lacked in money. We ate squirrel stew and went for walks by the sea, with the wind whipping color into our cheeks, and at night Mr. Cooper played his cello and his son Robin played his guitar and we sat by the fire and sang and read aloud to each other. If it sounds like a storybook, it was – and the most storybook thing about it occurred on Christmas Eve, when we walked down to the village shops, went our separate ways, and bought little gifts for each other, ducking in and out of the stores in order to hide from the others. The Cooper family’s entire Christmas shopping for the year took place in about an hour, right there a few blocks from their house, among friends and neighbors. And it made a memory I have from that day to this.

My second magical memory is of a Christmas in San Francisco, when a friend and I – both late in tackling our gift lists – decided to take the ferry to Sausalito and do our shopping there. All of it. In a single afternoon. So again I’m recalling a breezy seaside setting, this time a picturesque old fishing village made up-to-date “quaint,” but still charming, and filled with unusual gift items. We strolled the old streets and explored galleries and gift shops and even the hardware store, and crossed names off our lists as our packages accumulated. When our shopping was done, we boarded the ferry and stood on the fantail in a stiff breeze, feeding the sea gulls and watching the sun set beyond the Golden Gate. And we concluded our adventure with a bread-bowl of clam chowder, which we ate sitting on an old wooden bench in the alley outside the bakery.

And my third magical memory took place right here, the year my cousin Barbaranne and I decided to see whether we could do all of our Christmas shopping right here in downtown Commerce. Both of us had been covered up with work, and were coming late to the task, especially considering that we had family far away whose presents had to be mailed to them. And we picked an unseasonably cold Saturday – or it picked us; it was the only chance we had to get together. But we warmed up in the hospitable environments of store after store, meeting old friends, seeing imaginative gifts, some of which we could never have found anywhere else, and stopping for hot chocolate and conversation in the drugstore (where we also found gifts for sale). The fashions in Jay’s, the home-office accessories in Commerce Printing, the unique selections in the antique stores and in what was then the Joy Shoppe and is now Giftworks, all moved our shopping along at a rapid clip, and when we became overburdened we made a quick trip to the car, which we’d parked in the middle of town. At the end of a delightful several hours, our shopping was done, our cheeks were rosy, and our outlook was even rosier. So – my advice? Don’t have a Black Friday after Thanksgiving. Have a bright and happy one. Be among friends. Shop in town!

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and is a volunteer for the Commerce Library Board and the Jackson County Literacy Program.