I went Christmas shopping Saturday with my wife.  This is a thing that we do once annually.  It's a pretend date.  I pretend to be cheerful, and she pretends that I'm fun to be with.

I try to have a good attitude.  I really do.  But there's something about ambling slowly up and down miles of aisles behind a shopping cart and a shopping woman that is truly exhausting.  I can climb mountains all day and have stamina to spare.  But put me in a store at a restricted gait, and I'm lame and down in the back in no time.

I'm not the only one with this malady.  I was grateful to discover that it's a male thing.  "I'm going to get you a wheelchair today," my wife said as we left our driveway.  "They have them, you know."

I didn't know.  Wheelchairs for handicapped husbands!  It was tempting.  I think she was joking, though.  If it wasn't for male pride and the acquaintances I'd see, I could easily allow myself to be pushed around a store for several hours.

As we stepped into Wal-Mart it was readily apparent that the U.S. Census Bureau had seriously undercounted the population of Eastern Oregon.

I had a flashback to Brooklyn, New York 31 years previous.  We were there for my discharge from the Navy, having just arrived from Morocco, North Africa.  Margie was pregnant and needed some baby things.  It was just before Christmas.  The entire East Coast had converged on the store where the cab dropped us.

I fought down waves of panic as we threaded our way past Black Panthers and other ferocious-looking men.  They were obviously Christmas shopping with their wives, too.

Inside the store was a sight I'll never forget.  As far as the eye could see, up and down every aisle, the sea of humanity was so dense that there was no earthly way to get near the merchandize.  We held tight to one another as the tide carried us along, lest the waves should tear us apart.

Gradually we worked our way to the baby department where a miraculous thing happened.  We were tossed upon an abandoned shore!  The baby department was an unpopulated island inhabited only by a lonely sales clerk.

This put a question in my mind that I've puzzled over ever since.  If women in New York don't have babies, where in the heck do all the people come from?

Three years later we had the babyless status of New York women reaffirmed.  Margie lay on a gurney in a hallway at Utah Valley Medical Center waiting her turn to go into a delivery room to have baby number two.  She was in a long line of terminally pregnant BYU college students and the wives thereof.  Forty babies were delivered that day.  We were told that more babies were delivered daily at Utah Valley Medical Center than were delivered in a week at New York General Hospital.

Having babies is the reason I was in Wal-Mart Saturday.  My father never did explain the facts of life to me.  The fact of life which every man contemplating marriage should be aware of is this:  If you have babies, you will have to go Christmas shopping.

"Why don't you go shop for Aaron and Jamie," Margie said.  "Aaron needs tools, but I haven't a clue what to get for Jamie."

I accepted the shopping cart offered by the cheerful greeter in the Santa Claus cap, and then had to break into a run to catch Margie before she got away from me.  She was moving!  She was a shopper with purpose.  There'd be no ambling today.  She pointed me toward my department, and informed me where she'd be located.

And then I was on my own.

I actually had fun selecting tools for Aaron.  Buying for Jamie was harder—downright difficult.  I found myself shuffling from one department to another and back again and assessing every item on the shelves and ending up in the non-kids department and my feet hurt and I was tired and lost and I wanted my mama.

I was completely tuned out to my surroundings or I'd have heard the store's public address system paging me:  "Jim Kerns, your mother is waiting for you at the checkout counters."

They actually said that.

"Don't have him paged," Brad and June Allen had told her, "or he'll really be mad."

I wasn't.  I didn't hear it.  I was just glad to find Margie and have it all over with.

My consenting to go shopping at all was part of a plan I had to get out of another distasteful activity.  The church Christmas party, "A Night in Bethlehem," was being held that night.  Attendees were to dress in Israeli and Arabic costumes to lend atmosphere to the village I'd helped construct in the gym.

I don't do costumes.  One of our few family vacations was a trip to the coast planned as an excuse to keep us from being here for the ward Primary party.  They were going to dress the husbands of the Primary workers as women, and have a beauty contest!

They'd do it without me.

Anyway, I couldn't go to Bethlehem Saturday night if I went Christmas shopping because I still had an hour of work to do at the shop in order to meet Monday's deadline.

Tastes and distastes are probably genetic.  My eldest son and his wife went to the Christmas party.  They ended up being drafted to man a booth left vacant by another family's emergency.

"Where's your costume, Nathan?" he was asked repeatedly.

"I'm a Gentile visiting Bethlehem," he answered smartly.

Why can't I be that quick?  I might have saved myself from an evening in Wal-Mart.