A little knitting

I did get a little knitting done over break. (Pictures to come later). The biggest thing is that I finished up the gift-mitts for the AAUW gift exchange, which is Thursday, so that was kind of important.

I also finished the first of a pair of "Copper Penny" socks. This is a Nancy Bush pattern, an openwork pattern from the "Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn" book. I started these over one of my summer breaks and just never finished them, part of it being I stuffed them into a bag and hid them in my room during one of the several times I had to have people in to work on stuff over the summer. I'm about midway on the leg of the second sock.

I have shifted back to the gift socks, which "need" to be done before I leave again in about three weeks. I'm almost done with one pair; the second pair, which is a "simple" pair still has the first sock unfinished. But I don't need to do any Christmas shopping, just Christmas knitting....

I almost totally avoided Black Friday. I just don't like crowds and I don't like the idea of being crammed in a store like a sardine and possibly seeing some of the darker sides of human behavior just to save some money on something. As I've said before, in my family, we're not big techies or anything, and also, there tends to be more emphasis on finding an "unusual" gift (something that fits with the person's interests but is not something you see EVERYWHERE) than in trying to get the "hot now" gift. And if I shop, either I like to do it in a leisurely way (looking around, going with no particular thing in mind) or be able to make a bee-line for what it is I want, get it bought with a minimum of fuss, and get home. And it seems like Black Friday maximizes fuss. I suppose some people like the bustle (what I would call chaos) of it but I do not.

I say "almost totally avoided" because we did go out and buy the Christmas tree. (Yes, it's early, but my dad can't lift stuff into or out of cars so well any more*, and my mom is fairly small, so they needed me to help wrestle the tree). We went to the long-time local garden-and-florist shop, they had lots of trees. Maybe not the cheapest but we found a good one easily and it's now sitting in a bucket of water in their garage. (We all decided, Well, they'd been cut in mid-November anyway, so if we bought a tree when I got up there a few days before Christmas it wouldn't be any fresher....) It wasn't crowded and no one was displaying any problematic behavior - it was busy, but people were patient and cheerful and it didn't take us long to get the tree stowed in the car and paid for.

(*Bad knees, plus an old shoulder injury that was probably a torn muscle)

I will say I do like the concept of Small Business Saturday (but I was traveling, so really couldn't take advantage). In general, my experiences with small businesses have been that they tend to be less crowded, people tend to behave better in them, than in the big-box stores. (I wonder why that is? Is it easier to see the proprietor and workers in a small business as "people" and not just "servants"? Or to see your fellow shoppers as more than merely obstacles? Or is it that small businesses tend not to have the loss-leader deals to get people in the store, and also don't have the illusion of scarcity ("Only 50 tvs at this price!") Or maybe it's just a different sort of person who shops at small businesses, I don't know.)

(I will say the "illusion of scarcity" thing gets to me. I still remember when I was a kid and seeing the lines and the fistfights and everything else over Cabbage Patch Dolls (I never had one; never wanted one) I don't know. To me, it doesn't seem right to want to knock someone down to get something that really is low on Maslow's hierarchy. As I said to my mom, when we saw a little bit of the standard b-roll on the news of people pushing and shoving in a store: I would hate to see what happened if we had food shortages in this country. And it does make me wonder: what would happen if we wound up in a situation like during WWII, where there was rationing of certain items? Would people mostly deal with it (with many finding ways around the rules, as apparently people did then), or would there be massive unrest? Or was there massive unrest then and we just don't hear about it in the standard histories? From what I remember from my older relatives, it sounds like most of them tolerated rationing and figured out ways to make do, doing things like making a sort of proto-Hambuger-Helper with beans and macaroni to stretch the meat that was on hand. Or some of the older men who were too old to go off to war hunted. My dad just vaguely remembers going to a fair and being served a bean burger rather than a hamburger and he says he actually thought it was neat because it was different, it wasn't presented to him as "you have to eat this because of the War." He also remembers that Christmas was pretty much the only time they had fresh oranges.... I have one of those mandarin oranges (they call them "cuties" or "halos" now) in my lunch today, and I admit it's one of the little things I don't often think to be grateful for, how much more available stuff like that is now.)