Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 24, 2002
Before the "Wal-Marting" of America, there were dime stores. And dime stores were where I went to Christmas shop when I was growing up in the Midwest.
I would wander the aisles endlessly, looking for that gift that was just right for my brothers and sisters and my parents. As a family with seven kids, we did not have much, so a dime store was just about the only place a kid like me could shop when a place like Sears was considered upscale and a place like Marshall Fields was just someplace you went to look at the window displays around Christmastime.
Lately I have been musing about those Midwestern childhood days, and it slowly dawned on me that I learned a lot more from that experience than I had thought. For one thing, I learned that you actually can get more from giving something than receiving something. I can't distinctly remember wanting any specific toy or other gift that much at Christmas, but I can remember many specific gifts I got for others. Getting (at least in my kid's mind) just the right gift for just the right person was much more important than gaining just the right gift for myself.
This "other orientation" remains today. I find it very hard to name anything I really desire when the holidays come around. But I relish the chance to try to make people smile when they open a gift from me.
Nearly every Christmas, I have gotten one surprise gift for my wife. One year it was a guitar, even though she did not know how to play it. Another year it was a stuffed dog, the first one she had had since childhood. These gifts may be slightly goofy, but they seem to be the ones she remembers most, too.
Another thing I feel I learned from those early holiday shopping experiences was the ability to be pleased with very little. Since my parents couldn't afford lavish gifts, we did not really expect any. When I got a mechanical train rather than an electric one, I appreciated it very much.
One of our daughters said that it does not take much to make me happy. That is true for my wife and me, because we share the same value of not having a great lust for lots of material things. A simple meal at a fast food restaurant is not necessarily greatly inferior to a sumptuous dinner at a full service restaurant, as long as we have each other's company.
I think this value of being happy with simple things stems from neither wanting nor expecting great things during the holidays. A final value garnered from those early dime store days was an ability to be a little awestruck by the vast array of consumer goods available to most Americans. My awe is akin to the Russian's in the movie Moscow on the Hudson (played by Robin Williams) who faints when he goes to his first U.S. supermarket because he is overwhelmed by all of the choices. I am still capable of swooning a bit when it comes to Christmas shopping in this great country of ours, and my dime store dreams as a kid made me appreciate all the choices that stores offer. Not bad -- three life lessons still with me from wandering around a store as a kid. And at this time of year as I look for gifts, I am lucky enough to have part of that kid still with me.
-- Douglas Spangler, a writer and former university administrator, lives in Palm Harbor. Guest columnists write their own views on subjects they choose, which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.