I don’t know about you, but I tried Black Friday once, years ago before the day got so big and crazy with people crowding, pushing and fighting over items. Even before all the bigger hassles, I swore I’d never go again. And I haven’t and I will not ever if I can help it.

What I did instead since then has been to try to find this or that good buy for gifts all along during the year. I get the Christmas shopping done early and when the Christmas shopping rush starts, I stay at home and only go to the drug store or grocery store until the New Year. That plan really worked for me. I saved some money on sales, I didn’t have to cram all the shopping in one day, much less stress involved and I got finished early.

It worked well until this year. For some reason, maybe the economy in general, I didn’t run across as many good sales during the year, so I had more to purchase at the end of the year. I still didn’t attempt Black Friday, but did decide to try Cyber Monday.

This fall, we bought a house and the plan was to be moved well before Thanksgiving. Well, here it is the week after and we are still packing, dodging boxes and wondering if we will ever close on this house. The move has added stress to the holidays. Packing and getting ready to move has taken lots of time which I could have spent shopping earlier in the fall.

So I decided to pack part of the day on Cyber Monday and shop online and hopefully just sit back and wait for the gifts to flow to me through the mail. Well, I did get a good bit more packing done. I gave myself from 8pm until 12 midnight to search for and purchase the last six gifts I needed. Granted these six are the hardest to buy and it does take some time to search. I only went to one department store where I could find it all and they were having a great sale. So, I found four items got the right sizes, colors, etc. then my wireless internet gizmo that is supposed to run five computers at once crashed on me, the only computer in use at the time. So I started all over again, looking up the same four items, only to get to number three and it happened again, only this time it was the browser that stopped working. I got everything going again and by this time it was getting late. I again found the first four and quickly added two more that I wasn’t really satisfied with, but I was running out of time. I had to check out. One price had already changed on me, even before midnight. I had my card ready, putting in all the information for shipping, etc., and you guessed it. It crashed again about three minutes till midnight.

Totally frustrated, I turned everything off and called it a night. Cyber Monday, except for the crowds and travel, was almost as frustrating to me as my Black Friday experience. So today I started early in the day and left the packing until later. I was able to find some of the items I tried to order yesterday, but I paid more. Some of the items were no longer available at all. So I learned a good lesson. Start early on Cyber Monday, just as most people do on Black Friday. My computer problems could have been that I was online when half the country was off work and also online trying to shop as well. I may try it again, but I will keep the lessons from this year in mind. Hopefully, I’ll have more success next time.

Happy Holidays!

Peggy Williams

November 30, 2010