The Premiere

Ahhh...the Christmas season. Supposedly filled with festive, good-spirited cheer, I'm sorry to say that holiday shopping really brings out the beast in some people. Today I made my yearly trek to the Houston Ballet's Nutcracker Market, an shopping event held every year here in the Bayou City. It starts Thursday and ends Sunday, but my MIL INSISTS that we all get there when it opens on Thursday morning at ten. We, being my mom, my MIL, and me.

Traffic is a mess, parking is way out, lines are L-O-N-G, and these women are push-y! You would seriously not believe. It's like a cattle drive: ladies weighed down with purses and purchases, going with the flow or fighting up-river. Women in kitten heels and leather pants and feathered sweaters and anything else you can imagine, all crammed into a convention center type space (not the enormous George R. Brown Convention Center that hosts the annual quilt show, but still). Women wander around with no sense of direction, no concept of where their belongings begin and end, sipping bloody marys and sampling the rather stunning array of holiday food items laid out for a taste. In the background are rotating children's choirs and the raucous, boistrous cacophony of women's voices.

Just writing about it gives me the heebee-jeebees. It's really rather amazing that I make the trek back every year--it's so not me. But I do. And every year I find that special something that I would never have found anywhere else.

But I'm not crazy. If the line's too long, I pass it up. If the price isn't right, I keep on walking. But some of these ladies will stand in a thirty minute line for restaurant spaghetti sauce or Houston-famous tamales. Not me. I've been going to this event for fifteen years--I no longer have stars in my eyes. Now I just want to get in and get out. The pushy crowds have ruined for me. But still, I go.

And tonight, I suffer. Like an idiot, I wore boots, parked off-site, hoofed it in, through the market, and then back. Aaaiii, it hurts...