This is a typical holiday for me: I have enough, probably more than enough, to give to everyone I will spend time with over the next week. I have a fridge that is well loaded with food and extra fruits and vegetables in a cool storage area. Yet here it is the day before the stores shut for at most two days and I am wrestling with a compulsion to go out and buy more.

Resisting the Urge to Grocery Shop On the Busiest Morning of the Grocery Year

Buy fresh mushrooms and fresh strawberries and fresher sesame and poppy seeds! A voice inside commands me. Or maybe blue cheese. Or a different flavour of vinegar. Your salad will be too normal without them.

Trying to calm my frantic brain, I flip through several online recipes. It’s obvious I can make a lovely salad using ingredients I have at hand. Still a little voice keeps piping up and saying “Yes, but not as good as….”

Fighting the Need for Another Small Gift Before the Malls Close

I don’t actually shop at Malls much for Christmas. Yet today, when they will likely close before 2 p.m. I find myself thinking things like: they have that little jewelry boutique and that handmade chocolate store. Go get another ring for that relative and a box of hand dipped orange cremes for that aficionado. Apparently the broach and stirred-with-love raspberry fudge I already have are just not good enough.

How I Beat the Need to Shop

I hate to admit it but the weather is the real reason I can defeat these little shopaholic voices. It’s very foggy out right now and obviously dangerous to drive. Having a dead mother or even just a severely injured one is not really what my kids want for Christmas. (Some other days when I’m forcing them to walk to school through a blizzard that may be another matter.)

So instead, I’ll just go frantic at home. I’ll pore over recipes and make the oddest salad possible. I’ll bake another kind of squares even though we have a half-dozen already. (Yes, but apricot squares with lemon icing are that person’s fave!)  I’ll probably even edit a few dozen photos into collages in Photoshop and send off another calendar to print before the New Year (after all, if you haven’t rendezvous’d with your loved ones yet, you don’t have to have all of their presents ready by Christmas!)

Still, it will be better than dodging through crowded parking lots and reading War and Peace including the annotations before getting to the front of the check out line.
It probably won’t hurt my finances any to stop spending either.

If you suffer from shopping-inducing voices, I wish you calm and quiet and an end to the stores. May you be able to look with love on those around you and realize everyone already has enough.

Related Reading

• Why Would You Buy That Instead of Saving in a RESP?

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Do you find that even after you have your list checked off you feel a nagging sense that something’s missing? How do you resist the compulsion to over-shop? Please share your experiences with a comment.