The (Un)Christmas Spirit
It was probably a mistake to do our weekly grocery shopping trip on Sunday night – two days before Christmas – at Walmart.
The place was packed, which was slightly amusing, but not really surprising. Our walmart is a supercenter, but it’s a small one – and it’s not one that is often frequented by a lot of people – at least not when we do our shopping.
The first thing on our list was a replacement Christmas tree stand, since Devon broke ours while trying to put the tree up the night before. They were sold out. It figures.
We got all of our groceries, and went to stand in line to check out. There was a bit of a wait. The woman checking out two people ahead of us was experiencing a bit of difficulty. She had wrung up over 800 dollars worth of stuff, and then had difficulty paying. She called over a manager to complain, and then couldn’t manage to get her payment settled. We were in line for over half an hour. By the time that mess was settled, there was only one family ahead of us in line. The cashier wasn’t even a cashier – he was a stock-person, and you could just tell that he had enough. He put the closed sign up and turned the light off, intending us to be the last person checked out. The guy behind us had a fit and started screaming that he had been waiting patiently in line, etc. The cashier agreed to check him and the guy behind him out as well, which I thought was really nice of him, given the circumstances. By that time, Devon and I were just done with the whole walmart scene, and I started to laugh. The guy behind us got all “uppity” and said “well I don’t think it’s funny”. That only made us laugh harder. Devon managed to slightly appease him before it turned into a nasty altercation. We checked out, apologized repeatedly to the cashier for some of our fellow-shoppers attitudes. As we were leaving, the cashier was trying to explain that he was closed, and would only be taking two more customers. We ran out of there before a riot ensued, since everyone behind those two guys started screaming their outrage.
It seems that people fail to remember that it’s supposed to be a happy time of year. That we’re supposed to be looking out for our fellow human-kind and do nice things – just to do them. They get wrapped up in the stress and the ridiculousness of the shopping and forget that people are just people – and that everyone is entitled to a mistake. If there’s one thing I’m going take away from this holiday season – it’s to remember to gain a few extra measures of patience. Sure, not everything goes according to plan, but that’s no reason to take it out on a stranger. Be polite and try to find the humor in everything. Then you can make it through the holidays successfully – and may find a lot more joy than you expected to along the way.
This work by JMcFarland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
