When Men Go Shopping

Men may detest shopping, but there's no escape during the holiday season.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Meghan Cox Gurdon points out that while men may detest shopping, there's no escape during the holiday season...

Here we are, hurtling toward the climax of the "holiday shopping season."

It is bizarre to think that what began in violence on Black Friday -- with fistfights, a stabbing, and a fellow getting trampled in upstate New York -- is about to end with the clear, beautiful voices of children singing carols about peace. It's a funny old world, as someone said.

Apparently we Americans have returned to our zesty-spending ways this Christmas. The International Council of Shopping Centers, which represents mall-based retailers, is predicting that seasonal shopping in 2010 will turn out to have been the most lavish since 2006. The ICSC further anticipates that more than 23 million people, something like 15 percent of the adult population, will still be out shopping on Christmas Eve.

Among that number, I'd wager, you will find 99 percent of the husbands and sons who detest shopping 99.9 percent of the time.

You probably know one of those men; perhaps like me you are married to one of them. Or perhaps you are one of them! Outwardly they appear unremarkable but inwardly they are characterized by an extreme allergic reaction to piped-in music, clouds of perfume, and the bovine sluggishness of crowds of browsers.

Alas, Christmas Eve -- the most intensely crowded, piped-in, and perfumed day of the year -- tends to be the very moment when these poor men finally force themselves to push into the hordes. It's perverse. If they bought Christmas gifts for their families in, say, August, or even November, they'd have the stores to themselves and no "Santa Baby" playing in the background. But I suppose the nature of perversity is that it causes people to do illogical, self-punitive things.

Whatever the cause, if you pop into a department store in the next 36 hours you will see them: They tend to have a jittery, hunted look but they move fast. A procrastinating man goaded by in-store Christmas music can make it in and out of a jewelry department, bagging a gift in the process, in the time if would take most women to peruse a single counter.

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