That Time of Year

So many people have told me that working in retail ruins holidays—Christmas starts too early and the retail buzz cramps your own Christmas spirit. For me, it was just the opposite.

Disclaimer: I didn’t work in big retail box chain store. I worked at a small town, locally owned True Value Hardware. But retail is retail.

True Value made me feel very Christmasy. Of course, we didn’t set up the display trees in late August, and though there was a fair amount of strange holiday merchandise, it wasn’t rows and rows of trashy, glitter-infested plastic. I usually got to set up and decorate the trees, or at least help in the process—it sort of became part of my “other duties as assigned” tasks, as I was one of four females who worked in the store. But it made me feel fancy—decorating expensive trees with classy ornaments, making them look very HGTV in a way that my own tree will never look.

We sold real trees outside, so the scent of pine wafted in through the double doors when there was a brisk December wind. We sold fancy ornaments and boxes after boxes of white lights.

And when I’d work a Saturday, and fluffy snow whispering to the ground, blanketing my ghetto van and Levi’s powder blue El Camino in a velvet layer of white, I’d watch through the giant windows, soaking in the pine, and the decorations, and the small Minnesota town outside drinking cocoa and sitting in front of a cozy orange fire—and I’d think, now this, this is Christmas.

And maybe we started decorating before the Thanksgiving turkey had been carved, and maybe the season lasted a little too long for many people’s liking, but is it ever too early to celebrate Christmas? For me, it was never about stockings or candy canes or presents. It was that holiday spirit of joy, contentment, giving, and friendliness. Why does everyone only want to feel sentimental and generous for a few weeks in December? What’s wrong with practicing this happy holiday spirit year round?

Maybe because I only worked at True Value for three years, I wasn’t so jaded by the holiday retail loathing. Maybe because I was just a kid, I didn’t feel the pressure of buying the perfect gifts for everyone and still trying to feed my family. Or maybe there’s just a whole lot more to feeling the Christmas spirit than eggnog and carols.

Maybe Christmas is a state of mind.