As I type this, there are 26 days, 6 hours and 16 minutes and some seconds until Christmas and guess what! I have almost all of my Christmas shopping over and done with. I only need to think of what to get for my grandson and then shop for it. I'll probably do that online but since my daughter told me "who knows haha" in a text she sent to me, that may take a while.
Now, if you read that carefully, you may have noticed I said "I only need to think of what to get for my grandson". As usual I plan to keep on shopping even after I pick out and purchase my grandson's presents. It's not that I need shop for more gifts for family or anyone else but that I plan to buy at least a couple more things for some folks. As usual, I will keep a long standing tradition of mine going as have done ever since I was a youngster still in Catholic grammar school under the tutelage of those vicious tyrannical attack penguins known as nuns of the Dominican order. At first, I'd go Christmas shopping with my brother, 5 years my elder. Then once I hit 9 or 10 years of age, I was allowed to cross the local side streets and by 11 or 12 was allowed to cross busier avenues and off I went on my own to shop on Christmas eve. As best I can recall, I have done that each and every year since then with the possible exception of Christmas 2011, a bit more than a month or so after my final cancer treatment. Those treatments were brutally debilitating so maybe I did not do it that year, then again maybe I did. If I had to bet on whether I did or not, I'd figure it at least 60/40 in favor of me having done so and I'd bet that I did.
The bottom line is once again, I will go shopping on Christmas Eve, at least barring any unforeseen circumstances that prevent me from doing so and any of them would have to be virtually insurmountable. I absolutely love the madness of shopping then, and let me assure you if you are going shopping in NYC on Christmas Eve, as I did for many, many years way back in my youth, the stores are madhouses, each and every one. Yet, I love it, its like a mini adventure.
Where I live now, I have not experienced that hyper type shopping. It is the type shopping that gives you a super adrenaline rush at the precise gotta grab now moment within a millisecond of seeing IT before THEY beat you to it. The they being 7 or 8 lunatic fringe hardcore shoppers, almost always lunatic married women, who saw the it, the same wanted by all item as you did, at the same exact moment as you saw it, when some 300 pound walrus of a half drunken slob husband moved something on the countertop, shelf or clothes rack and exposed exactly what you and all those psycho housewives had been searching for.
If you have never experienced the moment that you leap and dive into the middle of the discount counter at the same time as the claws of those zombie-like women are grabbing for the same thing - you have no idea of what a true super charged adrenaline rush does to you. The thing is, if you grabbed it first - good for you - but if you missed it and one of those wacko housewives got it first, then search begins anew. As luck or lack of luck will have it - you go through that process again and again in each store you visit, sometimes several times in the same store before you get what you wanted to buy or wind up so burnout from all those repeated adrenaline rushes with only a few minutes before the store closes that you settle for getting something, anything as that simply becomes, by lack of luck, the gift you need.
While they may not have planned it that way, I think the Rolling Stones may have sung a song about shopping on Christmas Eve, or at least some of the lines fit right in with shopping on Christmas Eve and perfectly describe the madness you go through trying to find that perfect last minute gift. It gets even crazier when you hear the voice coming out over the loudspeaker saying: Attention Christmas shoppers, the store closes in 5 minutes, please bring your items to the cashier right now and you haven't found it yet! Just grab something, anything, miraculously more times than night you will get exactly what you need; and remember, those workers want to spend Christmas Eve at home as much as you do.
Yes, shopping on Christmas Eve in that madhouse rush, at the last minute, is an amazing adventure indeed; or at least it can be depending on whether or not you got what you wanted or settled on something you needed. I can't wait, the anticipation is killing me, it's almost as bad as the actual shopping.
The video, according to the info at YouTube, is from a live recording in London back in 1968 when I was thirteen and was doing my Christmas Eve shopping in the early years. Hell, Mick Jagger and the Stones were all in their younger years as well. I wonder if they ever shopped on Christmas Eve.
All the best,
Glenn B 
