Ok so I know they don’t have anything against me personally, it’s more of general hatred of parents!  Nor is this financial destruction of parents confined to Disney (but in my case, Disney is a major offender!)! Yesterday I was out Christmas shopping and as the mother of two little boys I was obviously wandering around a lot of toy stores, Christmas wish lists in hand.  

My attention was grabbed by some pretty faerie dolls and some glitzy pink princess stuff, but unfortunately nothing anywhere close was on the lists – but I did note a rather nice collectable Barbie that I thought would look nice in my collection and thought that if my funds lasted that far, perhaps I could treat myself to a Christmas present this year.  After-all I reasoned, the lists aren’t too long.

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Mental note to self, financial cost of items is not relative to length of list!  I soon realized that merchandisers have turned Christmas shopping for kids into a nightmare.  Now I love Christmas, I love the tinsel and the carols, I even love the shopping and wrapping.  But I draw the line at paying £10 for something that costs £5 if it isn’t associated with a movie or TV programme.  Problem is, when it’s on your child’s list in blue crayon and underlined 3 times – drawing the line is a fantasy and you pay the £10.  I wonder if merchandisers have children.  I wish them at least a half dozen so they get the message about what their marketing does to stress levels on a parent struggling to make Christmas wishes come true on a fixed and limited budget!

I wandered through aisles and aisles of cars and trains picking up this, putting down that and eventually realized that I wasn’t going to get the 2 major items on the list from that store so bought what I had and trudged to the checkout.  There a non-cheery assistant shoved my purchases in a bag and demanded the right amount of money whilst mumbling that she was too busy to check with another one of their branches if they had the missing items I was looking for in stock, and ignoring the way I wished her a merry Christmas through clenched teeth!

Three stores (not connected to the first store – if they can’t be bothered to make a call, they aren’t getting my £50!) later I had another beef with the merchandisers.  Why is it necessary to make a big commercial ding-dong about an item, and then have it in short supply?  Huh?  If you’re going to spend all that money on advertising, then at least spend the money to make sure there’s enough of them around!  I did get one item eventually, thanks to one helpful store ringing around several branches and locating me one in a nearby town, and the other, well that’s going to be left for another day when perhaps I’ll have found my Christmas spirit which is currently lost in a pile of receipts in a bag in the closet!  Oh, and unless there really is a Santa, the Barbie doll doesn’t seem to have any chance of coming my way any time soon either!