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MY 7-YEAR-OLD daughter is standing in front of a mountain of stuffed animals, trying to pick out a Christmas present for her 11-year-old sister.
Black dogs, gray dogs. Brown bears, white bears.
She holds up a chocolate-brown dog and turns it around, contemplating. Will her sister love this dog or just like it? Will she even want it? Is the black dog better? What about the white bear?
There are so many factors that go into picking out gifts but, in this store, price is not one of them. This is a dollar store, where you can buy everything from decorator plates to laundry baskets, coloring books to bubble bath, for just $1. And $1 is a perfect price point for a 7-year-old’s budget.
Not that shopping here was her idea. Oh, no. I’m the one who brought it up.
“But I’ll never find anything there,” she wailed.
The alternative, however, was to shop at pricier retail stores for the nine people on her list. I envisioned her handing a cashier purses at $35 apiece and $8-a-pop socks, and neither of us had enough money in our wallets to pay for stuff like that.
No, a dollar store, the pinnacle of affordability, was the best way to scale back such expectations.
“If you shop at a department store on your budget, you’ll be able to purchase only two gifts,” I told her. “At a dollar store, you can buy something for everyone on your list.”
So here we are in front of all these animals. Now, all my daughter needs to do is decide.
She puts one dog back, picks up another, then puts that one back, too. I want to tell her to hurry up, but this is her moment, her powerful, glorious moment. Because a Christmas shopper holds all the cards when it comes to what to buy and what to reject. Why, she could ditch the whole dog idea and surprise her sister with a package of hair elastics. Or nail polish. Or white tights.
You just can’t hurry such power as that.
Finally, she puts a gray-and-white dog in the shopping cart and we move on. In the next aisle, we paw through a bin of picture frames that look as if they are made of wood, pewter and bamboo, but are really plastic.
My daughter is warming up to the whole dollar-store experience now. She quickly picks out a faux-silver frame encrusted with imitation blue gems, drops it into the cart, and checks her older sister’s name off the list.
Now, what will it be for her three teachers? The possibilities are endless. Place mats, pencils, peanuts? Sticky notes, sponges, squeegees?
We come to a halt in front of the makeup brushes.
“What about these?” I say. “You could buy one for each.”
“I can’t get the same thing for everyone,” she says.
“But, they’re not exactly the same,” I say. “See? The cases come in three different colors.”
Her scowl tells me I’m violating the most important rule of our Christmas-shopping excursion, the mandate that says I can give advice, but I cannot make the final decision.
Even so, she puts three cases—pink, purple and blue—into the cart.
Check, check and check. Only a brother and a father left on her list.
“What about that?” she says, pointing to a two-pack of hand towels.
“For a man?” I say. “Probably not.”
She peruses a jumble of 25-foot phone cords.
“Not those, either,” I say.
We are about to resort to candy, our traditional boy-gift standby, when we see the personal-hygiene items.
“What about a hairbrush?” I say. “Or a comb?”
She deliberates for only a few seconds before selecting one of each.
“That’ll be $8,” the cashier says after she scans our stuff at the register.
My daughter triumphantly hoists both bags above her head as we walk to the van.
“I think,” she says, “that we should call this our ‘dollar-store Christmas.’”
To reach MARCIA ARMSTRONG:
540/374-5000, ext. 5697
marciaa@freelancestar.com