For one thing, all that panicky publicity for days like "Black Friday" turns me off. It doesn’t even sound like a day that should usher in a season of joy. The name seems more suitable for a day on which the stock market crashed or as the title for one of those doomsday movies about the time when a swarm of giant, man-eating locust blackened the sky.

In case you don’t know, it’s supposed to be the day on which shoppers flock to the stores and do their duty as patriotic Americans by spending enough, even if it means going into debt themselves, to change the ink on retailers balance sheets from red to black.

Like Scrooge, I’ve always been a last minute shopper. However, he had it easy. All he had to do was buy that goose hanging in the window and everyone was happy. I haven’t the slightest idea what to get for anyone. My children and grandchildren and great grandchildren already seem to have everything and my wife says she can’t really think of anything she wants. For that matter, neither can I.

Generally we agree to buy something that we both want, but since we bought a new large screen television a few months ago we can’t even think of anything else. As for the rest of the family, as impersonal as it may seem, we’ll probably end up giving money so they can buy what they want. Then I’ll add a few smaller items like books and CDs and small toys for the great grandchildren so we’ll at least have a few things to wrap and put under the tree.

There was a time when things seemed so much simpler. I recall, for example, the first Christmas when instead of just waiting to see what Santa would bring me I actually bought gifts for others. It was in the early 1930s when I was about 12 years old and I decided to join the Christmas Club at the First National Bank of Bergenfield on Main Street near the railroad station.

The way that worked was that you told the bank how much you wanted to save each week – it could vary from a quarter to as much as five dollars – and they gave you a small booklet and each week when you made the deposit they would put a stamp in the booklet. You were supposed to make 50 deposits, one a week, and two weeks before Christmas they gave you the money back. You didn’t even get interest. It was just a way to help you save. In my case I gave them a quarter a week from the dollar or two I was then making from my magazine route and two weeks before Christmas I presented the paid up booklet to the cashier and received all of $12.50 in cash. It seemed like a small fortune, enough to buy something for everyone with money left over for myself.

Mom got a bottle of Evening in Paris Perfume that I bought at Woolworth’s; dad, a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes that I had to swear to Mr. Roffman at his stationary store were for dad and not for me. Grandma got a lace handkerchief and grandpa a package of Model tobacco for his corn cob pipe. I even got my sister Virginia a Big Little Book that cost a quarter. I wrapped each present and put them under the tree with a tag and on Christmas morning when my mom opened hers she said it was just what she wanted and dad kept shaking his before opening it and guessing that it was a tie although I was sure he knew all along what it was.

There have been many Christmases since then and they have all merged into a montage of overlapping memories, my own ghost of Christmas past; fuzzy visions of the first one my wife and I spent together once World War II had ended, the times when our own children were young and came bounding down the stairs on Christmas morning to see what Santa had left, the years when grandchildren and great grandchildren joined the family.

After Scrooge is visited by his ghosts he becomes a man of whom Dickens wrote, "It was always said that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge." Would that the same could be said of us all.

And so, as Scrooge himself might have said, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours.