Some Still Leave It To Last Minute Procrastinators Keep Shops Hopping As Christmas Nears

If there’s one widely understood precept about holiday shopping, it’s this: Waiting until the day before the day before Christmas is insane.

You should be at home, roasting the duck, wrapping that tie for dad and train set for junior, snuggling by a warm, popping fireplace.

But the evidence was in the aisles Saturday, as it is every year.

You put it off until the next to the last day.

So what’s your excuse?

“Busy?” said Cindy Robison, sheepishly, after she thought about it for a while. Robison is suffering from a strong case of procrastination.

“Here, here it is,” she says to her husband, Jim Robison, holding up a mouse pad with an Irish prayer on it in the downtown Coeur d’Alene store All Things Irish. “It’s a mouse pad. Perfect. If he doesn’t use it for a mouse pad, he can just hang it up.”

Add a coffee cup, and she’s done with a family friend from Lewiston. Twenty gifts to go.

Yes, she’ll probably be sending a mailbag full of gift certificates and checks.

But like the Robisons, some of this year’s holiday shoppers at least discovered an increasingly obscure venue: local downtowns. The crowds are thinner, the presents less mass-produced, and you don’t have to walk a mile in black slush from the parking lot to the front door.

Some were even finished with their shopping, and went downtown just for the heck of it.

Maya and Martin Peck drove from Astoria, Ore., to visit Bayview’s Doris Judd. The Pecks were tooling around in Ramblin’ Rose, a clothing store on Sherman. Their shopping was simple because they didn’t buy much.

“We don’t believe in Christmas being all about gifts,” Maya says.

“It’s hollow,” Martin agrees. “You’re never going to be satisfied just buying and buying and buying.”

Inside Coeur d’Alene’s Target, shoppers joined what seemed like half of all humanity in sheer madness.

Some men wandered through the women’s underwear department with glazed looks in their eyes. They had no idea what they were doing.

An exception: Gerry Bauerle. He was at Fred Meyer, making a gift basket with cheeses, crackers, sausages and wines.

For whom?

That’s the tricky part. This is Bauerle’s backup gift. Every year, someone he wasn’t counting on buys him something, and he has to look at his shoes because he doesn’t have a gift in return.

Not this year. Somebody’s getting a gift basket.

“We get a bad rap,” Bauerle says of male shoppers. But this year he’s extra prepared.

Some women, detailed shopping lists in hand, flipped gifts into baskets faster than the Tasmanian Devil spins.

An exception: Kelle Gammel. Her excuse for last-minute shopping - the big Santa present for her 6-year-old - is a good one.

“I’m a single mom,” Gammel explains. “He’s always with me.”

So with only one gift to spare (she did buy a bunch of stuff earlier in the day), Gammel seems pretty relaxed. She’s strolling slowly down the toy aisle, tilting a toy motorcycle her son has asked for. Deciding against the Nintendo 64 was easy: “He spends too much time in front of the television as it is,” she said.

But she’ll probably settle on something educational.

Then there are kids, arms surely an inch longer from being yanked on by frantic parents. If children were along, their own gifts were probably taken care of, and they were simply there to be looked after.

Lucky them. Kids get to be the sounding board for gift ideas they’re not really interested in, like the ties for dad and perfume for mom.

They acted like they cared. With only two days left until payday, they’re not going to do anything to blow it.

But that clock on the wall, the pages on the calendar are turning so slowly there must be a dead battery inside somewhere.

Why can’t Christmas just come?

And the adults are thinking: Why can’t Christmas just come a couple of days later?

Just a couple of days?

This sidebar appeared with the story: FAST FACT

There are only 366 shopping days left until Christmas 2001.