Tomorrow I'm taking the day off to go Christmas shopping.  Every year I say I am going to do this, but this is the first time I actually have.  I HATE shopping.  The problem is that I'm really cheap. 

There have been a few times in my life when I had enough money to spend a few hundred bucks freely without worrying it was going to mean forgoing dinners out for a few weeks.  In those blissful, Internet bubble years (because of course that's the last time most of us had money), I loved to shop.  Sometimes I shopped for entertainment.  But now that money is tight again, it's all I can do to shove my bruised debit card into those little machines. 

I have friends who are able to enjoy shopping, even when they are completely broke, through the power of credit.   I have often envied them their ability to put silly things like interest rates from their heads when faced with a really great pair of boots. 

However, it's the holidays: the great American celebration of material and gastronomic excess.  Tomorrow I will  brace myself for the mirth and gaiety and try to remind myself that both pounds and debt are easily shed with a little January self-control.  This frivolity thing is not easy for me. 

The mall.  There, in the name of Santa and the GDP, go I.