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| Christmas 2013. dwm photo |
I'm not sure when all the details entered into the picture for 'my' shopping day but I can tell you in our house you didn't set out to shop without a game plan.
Every week I'd save some of my allowance for shopping day. At one point, I had my very own Christmas Club account at the bank where I'd track my savings very closely. By the way, do financial institutions still offer "Christmas Club" accounts?
A week or two before Thanksgiving I sat down with mom to work on the list of people for whom I was going to get a gift. There was family, starting with mom and dad, my foster sister and then my younger sister when she joined us. There were two sets of grandparents, an uncle and aunt on dad's side of the family as well as two cousins plus two aunts and an uncle plus up to five cousins on mom's side.
A couple close friends were on the list and when I was working I gave a small gift to my boss. That turned out to be awkward, so I didn't do that the second Christmas at WCLO/WJVL. The names and the gift ideas were written carefully in a small, spiral notepad.
Before it popularly called 'Black Friday,' it was just the day after Thanksgiving. We piled into the car for the drive to downtown Milwaukee where we started our day at the Boston Store (recently refurbished and opened as Kohl's), then walked down Grand Avenue where we shopped at Gimbel's and other shops before eating lunch at Marc's Big Boy (yum!).
We shopped a little more after lunch downtown, then drove to the Brookfield Square Mall which opened in 1967. If it had been a cold day, walking around the indoor mall felt good. By this point we generally had everyone checked off our list.
After eating in the restaurant attached to Walgreen's, where mom generally bought that year's collectible glass, we headed home with our sleigh filled with gifts. By the end of the weekend most of the gifts were wrapped and ready to go.
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