Miserable on 34th Street

Last year, when I went downtown to see the Christmas decorations, I was seized with a bout of Scrooginess and jumped ship after taking a picture in front of the tree at Rockefeller Center. It was too cold and there were too many tourists. This year, however, things were different. Maybe I've gotten used to the icy winds and the crush of people that typify the holidays in New York. Maybe I'd been charmed by the garlands, trees, and other decorations around the city.

Bryant Park, where there is now an ice rink, a series of stalls selling handicrafts, and a temporary winter restaurant (really).

Plus, I'd already seen the Rockefeller tree with Shannon a week before, and, while it had been a crowded nightmare, it was over. My friend Chrysta was taking the train in to hang out for the afternoon, and so while waiting for her I decided to go to Macy's to see the windows and whatnot. (Plus I had to exchange something.)

The tree.

The crowd that arrived to gawk at the tree.

My Scrooginess didn't take long to return. The windows, done in a yes-Virginia-there-is-a-Santa-Claus theme, were nice and all, but I couldn’t get a very good picture of them because of the glare, and people kept bumping into me. One woman actually hit me with her stroller in her enthusiasm to get her one-year-old closer to the displays. I'm pretty sure the one-year-old did not know the back story about the letter to the editor and was not interested in the explanation either.

Yes, Virginia, there is a reason people avoid department stores the week before Christmas.

Inside Macy's, I was dismayed to find that there was a one-day sale occurring, and what was usually a busy crowd of holiday shoppers had been whipped into a frenzy. The decorations were indeed spectacular, but navigating the crush of people occupied so much of my focus that I hardly noticed them. There was, I learned, no section dedicated to returns, and I was told by an unsympathetic security guard that I would have to take both items back to where I found them. "But they were gifts," I protested. "I didn't find them anywhere." He pointed me in the vague direction of the Monet counter in the jewelry section. It took me over 15 minutes to find it, even though I wasn't far off, because the crowds made it difficult to move or even see very far in any one direction. The employees I asked didn't seem to know what I was talking about. There was a long line when I finally got there, and I kept getting pushed aside by women who wanted to paw through the boxes of baubles arranged along the counter that were going for 50% of their usual sale price.

Finally at the front, I was told that I could return only one of the two things there because the SKU code had been ripped off the second item and the woman didn't know the original price. She gave me a store credit, then sent me to the "gift" section. I had to go down a set of stairs to get there, which made the impression that I was descending to another circle of Hell even more vivid.

The gift section was a nightmare. It was even more crowded than the jewelry department because the sale prices were even more dramatic. I waited in a line that had no more than 5 people in it but that took 20 minutes to pass through. At one point, a beaming saleswoman approached me. "If you're just buying one item, there's an express lane," she chirped. "I'm returning it," I said. "Oh," she replied, looking tragic, and drifted away.

Finally at the front of the line, I passed over the box and heaved a sigh of relief. Next stop: bathroom. The cashier pointed out the missing SKU sticker and looked accusingly at me. "I didn't take it off. It was a gift," I explained. "And you don't have a receipt?" she asked. "No. That's funny, I could have sworn I just mentioned that it was a gift..." She consulted several other salespeople, but because the ravenous crowd of shoppers had cleared the shelves of all similar items, she didn't know how much it had cost and therefore couldn’t accept it back. "There are no more on this floor," she said. I'd now been waiting over half an hour, and I wanted to tell her to make use of the phone that was sitting inches from her keyboard to talk to someone on another floor and figure it out. Or else to guess. Or do to any number of things that might have persuaded me that, if given the choice between having either me or a rat infestation in their store, they'd pick me.

Instead, I took the wooden escalator down a level to find the bathroom, where the line reminded me of Splash Mountain at Disneyland. And that is when I left.