I'm rather excited about Christmas and all of the festivities that go along with the season. Recently though, especially since Thanksgiving has passed, I have felt like Dr. Seuss's "The Grinch" when I am at work. This tends to happen when it's really busy, after all, I do work for the largest corporation in the world....WALMART!!!

People spend way too much every year at Walmart, and I'm no exception. There are some customers that go into the Walmart I work at on a daily basis. That doesn't include those who work there. They spend a shit load of money shopping for materialistic crap that they don't need, then complain about how they have no money left to go grocery shopping or pay the bills, etc.

One day I heard a story that left me in disbelief. One of the associates that works in the toy department was saying that a woman who had come shopping with her daughter had made the irresponsible choice of purchasing a toy for her child and took the clothes she was going to get out of the shopping cart and left them on one of the shelves of toys. That didn't make much sense to me that a person thought it was a better choice to buy the toy instead of the clothing. Clothing is a basic necessity, especially in places such as Maine that get cold during the winter. On the other hand, toys are a luxury, which means therefore that they are not essential for living.

Then there are the children who go around Walmart with their parents, either sitting in the shopping cart, or walking beside it, and cry, throw temper tantrums and scream about wanting this toy or that toy. Kids these days tend to be way too spoiled for my liking. Christmas is less than a month away, yet children who I witness shopping with their families cannot seem to bear waiting to get that toy that they want so badly. Some of these children are the spawn of people who spend hundreds of dollars a year per child on Christmas toys, yet these are also the ones who wonder why their kids don't behave when they take them shopping to retail stores nationwide.

These bratty children should be fortunate to get spoiled, yet the want more. When I was a kid, my brothers and I were a charity case. We learned not to expect to see everything we wanted for Christmas under the tree Christmas morning or in brightly wrapped packages on our birthdays. We were the ones that got put on the charity Christmas lists and got used clothing from the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. We were the ones that grew up in section eight housing where there was always someone stealing something. One year it was my Cabbage Patch Kids doll whose head got ripped off, the next brother's bike, the year after it was Barbie dolls or Power Ranger toys.