11/28/08: Shopping for a solution? Try Goodwill toward all.

Imagine you woke up this morning and instead of the early-bird sales and requisite bleary-eyed fights over the toy of the year (remember Tickle Me Elmo?) of Black Friday, there was nothing to buy.

Or let’s say there was nothing new to buy.

What would you get your friends and family for the holidays?

The artsy among us would have it easiest, I imagine: They could paint a bunch of paintings, take a bunch of photos, write a few songs or short stories and dedicate them to multiple people from different friend groups.

The crafty could knit socks, make marmalades and scrapbook their favorite memories with such-and-such a family member or high-school buddy.

The rest of us would probably panic, until we remembered what would become the source of our salvation — that is, the Salvation Army. Consignment shops and Goodwill stores would suddenly be packed by people fighting over a Class Struggle board game, a minigrill that looks like a baseball, a mug with a recipe for onion soup printed on it. The really lucky might be able to pull an old fruitcake out of a closet or attic and re-gift it — to the really unlucky.

We’d probably search our wardrobes and basements for things we don’t need that someone else might, refashioning everything useless into “a planter.”

The effect of this kind of creating and shopping on the holidays would be that everyone would get completely unique gifts (except for the multiple dedicatees for those songs and short stories, and everyone who got a planter). Many of them would be more practical than what we’d have gotten otherwise. Some would be less, I suppose, but at least the product of panicked, last-minute closet foraging is likely to be funnier, more personal and more bizarre than what’s left at the mall on Christmas Eve.

We’d probably learn a lot. Going to Goodwill would prove to America once and for all that we have no need for the manufacture of new souvenir coffee mugs, ever. Your reluctance to give up those leg warmers and the hair crimper you haven’t used since 1988 might remind you of how fun those warmed-leg, crimped-hair times really were. In the end, we’d probably figure out that we didn’t need as much stuff as we’d thought to have a good holiday.

I can hear you more critical readers scoffing: “That’s kind of a clichéd line, Alicia. In fact, this whole idea is nothing but a slight variation on ‘The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.’

“And anyway, these aren’t the times to be thinking about shopping less, not with the economy tilting toward recession.”

Except that the point of capitalism is not to keep people gleefully spending themselves into debt; buying stuff isn’t actually patriotic. If the economy is going downhill, it’s because of our excessive and indiscriminate spending, not because we save too much. Some products, the bad ones, deserve to go unbought — even on Black Friday.

We can leave them in the stores and wait for the good ones. In the meantime, while inventors get to their inventing, we won’t mind our shelves being more sparely stocked if what we put on them is all useful or genuinely loved. We can swap and craft our way through the holidays.

In fact, we might not even feel the pinch of recession if we think about how we can use what we’ve already got instead of following fads.

Think about it: How many kids out there still play with their Tickle Me Elmos?

Couldn’t you just see him making a great planter?