Les Jones

Home Life > Christmas Shopping

So I've always procrastinated on Christmas shopping. This year Melissa talked me into doing early bird Christmas shopping the day after Thanksgiving. We got up at 6:00 and sleepily put together a plan of attack.

Do $29 DVD players really exist?
Wal-Mart was advertising $29 Apex DVD players for early birds. (I have friends with Apex DVD players, and they work great.) Sears had them for $27. We were going to West Town Mall anyway, so we decided to hunt the bigger bargain at Sears. (LATER: it's probably a good thing we didn't go to Wal-Mart for those DVD players.)

When we showed up at 8:15, the $27 Apex DVD players were sold out. Also sold out were the $40 Koss DVD players. To prevent any riots, Sears marked the $60 Koss units down to $40. Those had sold out, too, so the manager marked the $69 Samsung players down to $49. There were only three left. We bought two of those, and a couple of Spider-Man and Little Princess kid's overnight bags. It wasn't yet 9:00 and we had already bought Christmas presents for four people on our list. Last year it took us a week to do that much Christmas shopping.

Next!
Next on our plan was Kohl's, which had early bird specials until 10:00 AM. Most of their clothes were half off or more, and they were giving out $10 coupons for every $50 spent. We parked between Kohl's and Old Navy, so we went from one to another. Old Navy saved us last year: we bought clothes for infants, kids and grownups, size T1 to age 101. We found lots of good kid's stuff at both stores. It was 10:40. We marked five more names off the Christmas shopping list.

Next we went back to the mall for an assault on Proffitt's, which had early bird specials until noon. Most people worry about traffic on the biggest shopping day of the year, but Knoxville traffic wasn't bad at all, even at West Town. Proffitt's parking, on the other hand, was atrocious. Driving around looking for an empty space turned out to be a rookie mistake. We finally came up with a winning strategy: drive right up to the Proffitt's entrance and follow people to their cars as they leave the store, then get their space when they pull out.

By noon we finished most of our Christmas shopping for the year and had bought ourselves a new set of stainless cookwear. Lunch was a Chicago hot dog and beer at Frank &Stein's in the food court, and it felt great to sit down and take a load off our feet. Melissa had to talk me into shopping early today, but getting all those Christmas presents bought early felt great, and the stores had really good deals. I'd do it again next year.

P.S. Silliest gift we saw: a $60 S'More Maker. Second silliest gift: a $60 Smoothie Maker, which - surprise, surprise - looked a lot like a blender.