Careful...Your Christmas Spirit Is Showing

I have to tell you what Pooldad witnessed tonight at our local strip mall. First let me give a little backstory - As everyone knows the east coast was smacked pretty hard with a blizzard on Saturday. Our 'burb received 20 inches of snow which basically closed down everything. The airports, the malls, the grocery stores. You get the idea.

Pooldad and I have been through this kind of storm before [in January of 1996] and when that storm hit everything stayed closed for a week afterwards - schools, the government, stores and it was only 2 inches more.

So we were thinking - hey! Everything may be closed until Christmas. It happened in 96, right?, so we figured we had enough of our shopping done for the girls and if necessary we would just finish it up after Christmas day and have two mini Christmases. The girls were good with that and our families knew it was the best we could do.

Evidently with the advent of Christmas in a mere 5 days they plowed the heck out of everything and the stores opened! [Not the schools or the government mind you - but the almighty retailers were going to get those last Christmas dollars come hell or high snow drifts tadpoles.]

Pooldad took the girls out to our local strip mall last evening so they could shop for us, which is very sweet but looking back was probably a boneheaded move on our part because it seems the whole of Loudoun County has not completed their shopping and they were there too! Oh joy. No worries tho' because crowds don't bother the family and they were excited to spend their snow shovelling money. Like I said, very sweet.

Now you are going to discover why I do all my shopping on-line.

The girls were in Michaels shopping for both of us. In order that Pooldad not peek at their gift selections he went to stand outside of the store. And this is what he witnessed, 4 days before Christmas - y'know? The Season:

There are two lanes of traffic which run straight at the front of Michaels. Cars have a choice of going left or right once they arrive at the street in front of Michaels. The street in front of Michael's is two way traffic, one lane of each. On this street the cars travelling have the right of way and the other two lanes must wait to turn or a nice person can slow and wave them out. Due to the volume of traffic last evening it was slow going. Beyond slow. And the big problem was no one was allowing the two lanes to merge out into traffic to leave the parking lot.

Still following me? Good because it became really bad, really fast:

One white woman [yes race is relevant to this post, unfortunately] was waiting to merge for over 5 minutes and became frustrated because no one would let her in so she hopped out of her car and ran to the SUV that [at that point] should've let her merge and she physically blocked it.

And then she started to scream at the driver. "You are not moving this f* car and you are f* going to let me out you f* bitch."

This did not go over well with the [black] woman driving the SUV [imagine that]. The driver of the SUV rolled down her window and came back with her own slew of epitaths yelling "Get the f* off my car you redneck piece of trash and get the hell out of the road before I run your skanky ass over."

Then our antagonist decides to pull THE word out of her repetoire and started shrieking "Stupid, f* [insert worst racial slur imaginable], don't you yell at me you f* b*....." She kept on screaming and then she smacked the SUV's hood with both of her hands.

Nice huh?

Feeling his Christmas spirit dwindle just a bit Pooldad stepped back inside Michaels to get away from the scene outside and wait for the kids. He didn't witness the end.

I know the holidays are stressful for some people - but to act like these women did [especially the first woman] is wrong. People's expectations are just too high if this is what it leads to over a book or a bauble that your Aunt Judy probably doesn't want anyway.

Jeesh.