Once again this year I am doing my Christmas shopping online. It's just a matter of pointing and clicking, and I've got a lot of it done already. It lacks the interpersonal experience of going to the store where you can touch and feel and heft and poke things to see what they really are about. But it certainly is easier.
When I was a kid, my mother and aunt and I always made one very special Christmas shopping trip to downtown Chicago, which required a bus and an elevated train to reach. It was usually within close range of Christmas, so it was cold and often snowy, and the Loop was in full festive decoration, and the stores were busy, the sidewalks crowded. We would hit all the big department stores -- Wieboldt's and Carson's and The Fair -- and no trip was complete without a visit to Marshall Field's to see the famous Christmas tree that was four -- or was it five? -- stories tall.
During one such shopping trip just about in the middle of the 1950's, we were in Field's taking the elevator up to the seventh floor where the ladies' lounge was. It stopped along the way and one woman got on. Unlike every other woman in the elevator and in the store and in the Loop, she was wearing slacks. Even I at age nine or ten noticed it, since shopping (or just being) downtown in Chicago was a dress-up affair. She got off on the next floor, and the second the doors had closed behind her, a woman turned to her companion and said with disdain, "Hmmp! I wonder what suburb she's from."
We were from the suburbs too by then, but luckily we knew how to behave.
I wonder what that women would think of me sitting in my jammies pointing and clicking my way to Christmas shopping success.
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