I only know what the words Manolo and Blahnik mean, not because I watch Sex and the City, but because I have written speeches for people who do.  If that TV show and recent movie have done anything for Western Civilization, it’s boost the economy by moving boxes of shoes like barrels of oil.  These are shoes for girls, though.  Not boys.

In Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, one character - a Brit - has a condescending line about the shoes Americans wear, particularly American men.  I forget the exact line, but the man says something about how American men know how to ruin a good dress shoe by making it clunky and heavy, like some kind of boot.  Wolfe knows about shoes.  I’m sure his are all handmade on Saville Row, or on some centuries-old foot last somewhere in Northern Italy.  

And so, if you’d like to know what real men’s dress shoes look like, and if you’d like to see if you, too, are a victim of the thick Americanization of footwear, take a look at this slideshow and this essay about the best men’s footwear from Forbes.  If you wear a suit and a tie for a living, it might help to see how your shoes fare.  Mine, I thought, were nice.  After reading about these, I see that they are not.

’Tis the day before Christmas and the high water mark of the Willow Grove Mall parking lot. Today, the fluvial overflow of the holiday tide almost justifies the irrational exuberance of mall designers, as parking spaces up to Easton Road that are never used all year are grabbed with gratitude.

There are many mysteries of mall parking lots, to be sure, such as why they are always the homes of seagulls, no matter how far from the sea. But today’s curiosity is the sight of cars circling like vultures for the closer spots.

With due respect to the late Senator William Proxmire and his “Golden Fleece Awards,” I think parking lot attitude should be the next government-funded study. If the National Science Foundation can fork out $84,000 in 1970s dollars to find out “why people fall in love,” they can darn well look into why people pay to work out at the fitness center and then fight to park closest to Macy’s door so as to avoid walking to the curb.

It now seems the most obvious of solutions to this ulcerous annual tension, but it came as an epiphany at the time, that I can bail out of the games altogether by just heading for the nosebleed section of the macadam right off the bat. What liberation. What Christmas savings on a Bally’s membership.

“There’s an old joke: two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions.’ Well, that’s how I feel about life — full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s over much too quickly” (Annie Hall).

Christmas is like that too. It’s a deplorable, materialistic, Madison Avenue-driven, greed-inducing, decadent orgy that we Christians all ought to boycott — and I never have enough time to finish my shopping.

“Bricks without straw?” cried the Israelites, when their Egyptian overlords said that from now on they had to fetch their own straw to make the pyramid bricks — and without slacking off from their regular work.

As I write, it’s Tuesday, December 18th, and I have precisely one gift for my 18-year-old son and one for my 13-year-old daughter (a Sally Hansen “Spa Crème Hair Removal Wand”; she thinks she has a moustache). I got a calendar for my son who’s in prison. An hour ago, I phoned the facility and they said it can’t be larger than 8” x 10”, so I just measured it and it’s 8.5” x 11’.

There were five wise virgins and five foolish virgins headed to a wedding. The wise ones had started looking for sales in September, snapping up gifts at their ease. The foolish ones haven’t learned their lesson after 55 Christmases.

The Times has a nice, normal gift guide online that might help with your shopping.  Categories include Music, Books, and more, including the nice subcategories of Best Classical CDs, The 10 Best Books of 2007, and some sweet Housewares.

Ever had problems finding a customer service phone number for a web giant like Amazon?  In this Most Wonderful Time of the Year, when you might need such a number, Timothy Noah is here to help.

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The National Retail Federation predicts consumers will spend $74.5 billion in the 2007 holiday season. Has Christmas become little more than a national excuse to indulge our collective spending compulsion?

Imago Dei, a Portland church, began the Advent Conspiracy to restore the meaning of Christmas “by worshipping Jesus through compassion, not consumption.” It has four goals: worship more, spend less, give more, and love all. Last year, 5 churches participated and raised $100,000 by making gifts instead of buying them. This year, 600 churches have already signed up to participate and an additional 500 churches are participating through the World Relief Organization, which is using the Conspiracy for its Christmas campaign.

In the spirit of the Advent Conspiracy, here is a diverse (but not exhaustive) list of organizations that give life and hope to people who need it most.

1. Angel Tree is an affiliate ministry of Prison Fellowship that provides Christmas gifts to children whose parents are in prison. Donate money online or organize a program at your church.

2. World Vision, a humanitarian organization, has an online Christmas Gift Catalogue. (Last year, my sister bought me a portion of an “easy-care” alpaca for a Peruvian family, and this year, I’ve been eyeing a share of a camel for my grandma.)

3. Restoration of Israel is a Messianic Jewish organization that provides material support for Jewish people making Aliyah (traveling) to Israel. You can donate cash, goods, services, or…trees.

4. Farmers and Hunters Feeding the Hungry is a domestic Christian ministry of farmers and hunters who are “transforming a renewable, God-given resource into food for the hungry.” The ministry pays meat processors to butcher donated deer and elk to feed the hungry. You can make financial donations or you can donate a deer yourself!

5. If you do purchase gifts, buy from organizations that put 100% of the profits into the people and communities they support. Cultural Designs by Kate is a Lebanon-based organization that teaches women the skill of jewelry fabrication and then employs them. Select from over 200 one-of-a-kind designs online. Rahab Ministries supports Thai women who leave the sex-trade. The women make the greeting cards and jewelry that you can buy through the online bazaar.

I didn’t realize I lived so close to Mecca, but National Public Radio featured the religious pilgrimage of shoppers to the Willow Grove Mall up the road from me, in its obligatory lament of the state of American materialism and over-consumption. They spoke of queues lined up hours before the opening of the emporium’s hot retail fashion house H&M, which touts the best of both worlds — high-end clothing for low-end budget customers. This is what we like to do in early Christmas season: wring our hands about the doubling of the U.S. consumption in the last twenty years (NPR statistic) — and then go out and shop till we drop.

What in the world can we possibly still need, as last year’s presents molder in our basements? I learned the answer to that yesterday at a party pushing products for the kitchen. We need a metal “pie crust shield” (I am in the dark ages with my bits of aluminum foil); we need a “gravy separator” (I’ve just always waited for nature to divide fat from juice.); we need contraptions to pull tabs on cans and to separate egg yolks from whites (What are fingers for?). I settled on the “ice cream sandwich maker,” basically a plastic cylinder with a plastic lid to press into it. At $16, it was the cheapest I could do and make good my escape.