Dear Otus,
Every time I go into the mall these days, I get the vapors. I fear I’ll never finish my Christmas shopping.
- Dee Lerium Jacksonville
Dear Dee,
It was wholly a pleasure to hear from you, and I can totally sympathize ever since I witnessed Owner’s Great Faux Leopard Slippers Debacle of ’88.
It sounds as if you, like Owner, are a victim of SSAD - seasonal shopping atrophy disorder. He has had it for years, and it’s always triggered by the annual arrival of Christmas lights and decorations, which comes earlier and earlier.
An SSAD episode is a sudden surge of overwhelming paralysis caused by the knowledge that one’s soul will be judged by the appropriateness of Christmas gifts. Doubt that the right one will be found results in shopping atrophy.
SSAD symptoms can be overwhelming. They include nausea, trembling, hot flashes and fear that your credit card has become demagnetized. These are often accompanied by the classic “flight or buy” reflexes that humans experience in stores at Christmas.
The senses, overwhelmed by aisle upon aisle of shiny objects and piped-in Christmas music, cause shoppers to fill their carts with unnecessary plastic objects and cheesy gewgaws.
In the throes of SSAD, shoppers buy seemingly innocuous gifts that result in unfortunate unforeseen consequences. Such as leopard slippers.
Owner probably inherited the SSAD factor from his late mother, an inveterate shopper who managed her own disability by monitoring the Home Shopping Network 24 hours a day. The HSN operators came to know her by her first name.
Owner’s mother eventually controlled her condition by becoming hyper organized, something Owner has never been able to master. She would compile her extensive Christmas list in May or June. By October everyone would be taken care of.
She knew only too well that life’s too short for ordinary jewelry. That, and one can never have enough Hummel figurines or porcelain carousel horses.
In Owner’s case, he handles his gifting obligations by postponing them as long as feasible. Eventually, as the Christmas lights begin to pop up around the neighborhood and in the stores, he experiences mild sociological impairment that increases incrementally as Dec. 25 nears.
Owner has attempted various behavioral therapies to deal with his seasonal sensory overload. He even audited a Pulaski Tech “cognitive dissonance” class trying to cope.
Dee, knowing there is a problem is half the battle. The class was a systematic desensitization designed to accomplish “in vivo exposure” in a controlled setting - breaking the issue down into smaller, more manageable steps.
Owner tried shopping for a single person at a time rather than taking a list with many names. That’s how he came up with the perfect Christmas gifts for Miss Celia.
Miss Celia, as longtime readers well know, is accomplished in many fields ranging from gardening to pottery. She was never more thrilled than the year Owner gave her a chain saw and post-hole digger for Christmas.
Unfortunately, that was the same year that Owner made the last-minute SSAD-panic purchase of the infamous leopard slippers. At least his heart was in the right place.
Because Miss Celia is a woman, her feet are naturally always cold. So, when Owner spied the slippers at Wal-Mart, he placed them in his cart certain that he’d chosen a Christmas gift that would be worn and appreciated for years to come.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
It was 8:17 a.m. Christmas morning in 1988 when Miss Celia opened the present and politely feigned delight. She put the slippers on and was shuffling around demonstrating how cute they were with their faux fur flopping about when she was attacked.
Our late Gizmo the Tabby, a usually docile creature, was whipped into a sanguinary frenzy by the leopard slippers, mistaking them for a pair of unidentified wild creatures brazenly strutting their feralicity in his very home.
Miss Celia was fortunate she didn’t pull out bloody nubs. As it was, the leopard slippers were summarily eviscerated, their downy entrails strewn about among discarded wrapping paper and bows. Their disemboweled fleece linings formed pink ribbons of shredded scrap.
This year Owner hopes the classes and hard work pay off and he will avoid such gifting faux pas as leopard slippers. Perhaps that’s your solution as well.
Until next time, Kalaka cautions that even a single chorus of Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas” is often enough to send a serious SSAD sufferer over the edge.
Disclaimer Fayetteville-born Otus the Head Cat’s award-winning column of humorous fabrication appears every Saturday. E-mail:
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