Christmas Shopping - The correct method...

Well, this has to be a record - Flyingpops and I, having taken a day's holiday on Monday, have now largely finished (a few interweb orders aside) the Christmas gift shopping...!

Last year we weren't in this position until the 26th of November (still fairly organised, one might say, but) this puts us well over a week ahead of schedule...and doing it a week earlier actually made a whole lot of sense, the Christmas lights aren't even switched on yet in Crawley, but all the potential pressies are sitting there sparkling away, the point being the very few shoppers who actually dragged themselves out of the house into the drizzle on Monday morning were largely ignoring them, for most people it's simply way too early - in fact I think at one stage we found ourselves on our own in Littlewoods gift section...and shopping for *gifts* (rather than just DVD/CD/Games) is so much better when you can actually pick items up and examine the quality...

When it came to pay it was soooo easy, in fact, when we did hit a queue (in the Disney store) Flyingpops just put what we were planning to buy back on the shelf again and we continued to another shop! The result was that we had a completely lovely time...! Shopping, especially Christmas shopping, is normally a stress-filled affair - screaming kids, battered boxes, millions of shopping bags, millions of shoppers, queues, tripping over (or being blocked in by) push chairs, card machines failing due to increased demand, yelling, no parking places (etc. etc.)...to walk the customer-free aisles at our leasure and calmly browse all the pristine goods was (and I'm astonished at myself for saying this) actually a pleasure...