Michael Hoover: Holiday Bounty?

I have to write this column today, rather than two weeks from now as I had intended, because my wife is starting to look askance at my little experiment. The experiment began, believe it or not, in mid-August when the first of the catalogues— the holiday catalogues that is—began to arrive in the mail.

The simple experiment (it’s embarrassing, the extent to which a writer will go to get a column) involved carefully piling up all of the catalogues in a neat stack in an unused corner of the dining room to dramatize the extent to which advertisers will go to get your business.

The column now stands slightly over seven and a half feet high and it is leaning precariously, threatening the life and limb of our slightly invalid, 16-year-old Labrador retriever who persists in sniffing out this pile of glossy mags each day.

In addition to placating my wife, whose decorating ideas do not extend to floor-to-ceiling magazines, it is necessary to end this experiment because today’s mail brought 33 (I swear!) new catalogues which, laid on top of each other, measure over eight inches in height and no amount of cramming will fit them into the remaining space between the ceiling and the top of the pile. I would be forced to start a second pile, and, trust me, a second pile would not go over well.

This is not how it has always been in our household. Before I made the fatal mistake last year of ordering just two decorative items (if you must know, a copper urn that hides our garden hose and an outdoor wall planter) we were the recipients of a very modest, reasonable number of catalogues from your usual suspects such as local department stores. But my online orders must have triggered a domino effect of selling mailing addresses, as every conceivable specialty catalogue has now come our way. At first, when they were coming at a rate of just two or three a day, I rather enjoyed perusing them at my leisure. Then, like a speeded-up assembly line in an “I Love Lucy” sketch, they started coming at a rate of eight, then 10, then 14 a day, too many to ever browse through. One single day in October brought enough catalogues to equal the reading time of a quarter of Crime and Punishment.

Don’t misunderstand me, in many ways I love catalogues. Anything that will help me avoid even 10 minutes of shopping at Tysons Corner mall is golden in my book. I avoid shopping malls like a commercial plague. You can get hurt in malls, especially in the parking lots. Plus, you can get humiliated there. Did you see all those embarrassing front-page photos of customers, like linebackers on a called blitz, literally rushing into the malls and big box stores at five a.m. to take advantage of the early-bird specials? How demoralizing! That photo would never include me, but if it ever were to include me, you can rest assured that I would do myself in, rather than endure the possibility of a tombstone engraved with the memory, “Here Lies Michael, Who Was the First in Line at Wal-Mart’s Holiday Opening.”

Again, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy buying and giving gifts. While I can appreciate the sentiments of those many individuals who intentionally boycotted shopping last Friday, on a day they dubbed “Buy Nothing Day,” I still am charmed by the mission to find the one gift that will send just the right message of appreciation to the ones I love.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess that my better half is heavily involved in the retail industry and the more customers buy, the better off she and her family are.

There are several popular books out now encouraging the public to slow down, breathe, and not get caught up in the stampede to buy things. Their message is not to over-commercialize. They urge disgruntled modernists to give to charities rather than support the evil that is commercialism itself. It’s a sound message in many ways.

Yet, I think about how artists and craftsmen, designers and inventors from the dawn of time have funneled their visions into useful crafts and artistic creations that have brought joy to all of us. It’s the way of commerce for some to create and others to buy. If we were all, in the interest of purifying ourselves, to simply stop buying, there would be uncounted numbers of creators literally going broke. Is supporting these entrepreneurs really such a sin?

Anyway, my wife and I have carefully dismantled the leaning tower of advertising ‘zines in our dining room and we set aside several hours last weekend to calmly and rationally go through them with an eye toward culling the best each had to offer and finding as many suitable gifts as we could for our friends and relatives.

Curiously, faced with this amazing bounty of gift possibilities that ranged from fruit baskets to the ultimate in high-tech gadgets, we couldn’t find one damn thing worth buying. We do, however, plan on having a gigantic funeral pyre for all 886 catalogues whenever Fairfax County grants us the permit.