On this day each year I am thankful I live far from the big box stores and the madding crowd. (Madding means frenzied, in case you’ve ever wondered.) I really can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that some stores opened at midnight and will actually be open continuously through the weekend.

More common, of course, are the places that opened at five or six this morning – times which don’t seem at all unreasonable given the fact that our own alarm rings at five every morning of the year. What seems totally out of whack and unnecessary in the extreme is the shopping part. But then, “shopping is my one weakness” as Dorcas in “Lark Rise to Candleford” so memorably said about any number of things. But my weakness is not in the way you might think. I HATE to shop.

I’m not sure this shopping aversion came upon me. Not during my childhood, that’s for sure. I grew up in the Bay Area. We lived in Alameda during my elementary years and in San Rafael (Marin County) during my high school years. Later I would live on ‘the peninsula’ (now more famously called “Silicon Valley”) and for almost twenty years I lived in the Walnut Creek and Castro Valley (the East Bay). I used to say that I had lived all around San Francisco but never in the City, itself.

During all those (nearly forty) years, going to the City to shop was a big, big deal. Christmas wouldn’t have occurred without a trip to the City of Paris in Union Square to see its traditional 60-foot tall tree. And, across the way, we’d spend lots of time in front of Macy’s fabulous windows filled with life-sized mechanical toys and other magical visions. Also, we’d walk through Maiden Lane and into Podesta Baldocchi’s – the shop that has set the standard for florists since 1871 (which was, admittedly, before my time… but  I loved the idea that my grandmother had gone there when she was a little girl.)

It goes without saying, of course, that going shopping in the city was a dress-up occasion. And, as a special treat, we would eat in a restaurant – a very big deal even into the sixties. When I was little, it was always Blum’s on Geary Street where you could get the best hot fudge sundaes ever. Later, especially when we went back-to-school shopping, it was a little tea room upstairs in Maiden Lane. Come to think of it… none of my warm, fuzzy memories really involve buying anything at all.

I wonder when my shopping aversion began. I just know that ‘Black Friday’ sounds like something to avoid – like the Black Plague or the Black Death. I’d much rather hang out here in Oysterville, close to the left-overs. Turkey sandwiches and three kinds of pie! Yum!