With just four days left until Christmas, it may be time to admit you’re going to end up stiffing someone. You could just do what I do: just purr and let them give you gifts. If that’s not an option for you, there are other choices. According to a new poll from our calculating cousins at Consumer Reports, about half of the people who don’t finish their gift shopping in time give IOUs instead. [More]
christmas
King Soopers Defends Easter Creep
By 12.21.10
End displays of Cadbury eggs cropping up in supermarkets in December have had our readers doing double-takes. First there’s Christmas creep, then we had Halloween and Thanksgiving creep, but Easter creep? Yes, because you demanded it to be so, says King Soopers. [More]
Regift Without Getting Caught
By 12.21.10
Don’t frown when you get awful, impractical gifts. They can serve as valuable currency in the countless occasions in your life in which you’re required to distribute trinkets to people you don’t know or care much about. [More]
The Easter Bunny Continues To Creep Into Father Christmas' Candy Territory
By 12.20.10
While most of us are in the full throes of dancing sugarplum dreams and peppermint bark binges, it seems the Easter Bunny (or at least Cadbury) is not to be deterred in his efforts to overthrow the Christmas candy season — a seasonal creep we have come to call “Premature Resurrection.” [More]
How To Get Your Fatty Christmas Drink On, Or Not
By 12.20.10
One of the basic tenets of surviving December is that there must be enough alcohol to make the holidays, and the experience of answering “So, you’re still single?” for the eleventy billionth time, remotely tolerable. Getting fat during the festive season? That’s as unavoidable as your drunk Uncle Jim’s annual tradition of passing out under the Christmas tree, so why not tip the scale and get tipsy at the same time and get it over with? [More]
Is It OK To Give Flight Attendants Gifts On Christmas?
By 12.15.10
Anna booked a Christmas flight, and perhaps feeling a little guilty, she wants to show the flight attendants some love by providing some token gifts. [More]
Open Caption: Comforting The Fallen
By 12.14.10
Several shopping carts gather at the snowbank at the edge of the shopping plaza parking lot to pay tribute to a fallen warrior, felled in the Black Friday fracas. [More]
Beat These Deadlines To Ship Your Gifts On Time
By 12.14.10
If you’re shipping out gifts to friends and family, you may have to start sending out packages this week if you want to get them to their destinations by Christmas. Here are links to domestic shipping deadlines for some of the more popular shipping services: [More]
What Was The Best Gift You Ever Received?
By 12.10.10
Yesterday we asked you to tell about the crappiest present you ever received. And after all that outpouring of bad memories and disappointment we’re ending the week in a better mood. [More]
Costco Replaces Stolen Nativity Scene Pieces For Free
By 12.10.10
Not everything we write about involves people getting screwed over. Sometimes a company will go out of its way to do something nice for customers. Take the example of the Kansas family whose vandalized nativity scene is being fixed with the help of Costco. [More]
Would You Ever Rent Your Christmas Tree?
By 12.10.10
When we recently asked Consumerist readers if they would ever purchase their Christmas tree online, a few commenters wrote that they kept their tree potted all year round and would just bring it inside during the holidays. And now we’ve learned that there are a handful of businesses are offering this same service, for a price. [More]
What's The Crappiest Gift You've Ever Received?
By 12.9.10
With the Christmas countdown in full effect and Hanukkah 2010 in the books, the topic of gifts and gift-giving is everywhere. But for all the holiday cheer and goodwill, some gifts are bad enough to bring out the Scrooge in all of us. [More]
American Family Association Goes After Chase Over Lack Of Christmas Trees
By 12.3.10
Fresh off its apparent victory to put the “Christmas” back into Dick’s, the not at all crazy people at the American Family Association have re-focused their laser beams on JPMorgan Chase. Not because it’s a big bank who was recently sued for its alleged part in the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme, but because they don’t want Christmas trees in the lobby. [More]
Would You Buy Your Christmas Tree Online?
By 12.2.10
In November, Target started selling fresh-cut Christmas trees on their website, joining Costco in the growing number of companies who have turned to the web to offer holiday greenery. [More]
Parody: TSA's New List of Banned Carryon Items
By 12.1.10
The holidays are here so that means it’s time for the TSA to release a new list of items that you think would bring holiday cheer but actually need to be banned to protect national security. UCBComedy’s The Brig parodies TSA policies in this new sketch that is probably more disturbing (warning: blood n’ candy canes) than uproarious. [More]
Man Trampled In Target On Black Friday Thought He Was Going To Die
By 11.30.10
A man with a herniated disk who became trapped on the ground as shoppers raced into a Target on Black Friday says that while he lay there, he thought he was going to die. You can hear his pitched screams on the surveillance video. [More]
The Lego Advent Calendar — Now With Naked, Showering Santa
By 11.29.10
Consumerist reader Trevor was having a look through Lego’s online shop when he decided to take a closer peek at the company’s Lego City Advent Calendar set. And what he saw there was something that could shake any child’s feelings about Kris Kringle to the core. [More]
Cheap, Easy Gifts To Hand Out
By 11.29.10
Nothing can slaughter a budget like a long list of friends and family members who expect gifts from you at the end of the year. It’s tough enough to handle the logistics and man hours it takes to get your holiday shopping done, but you have to be much more creative when funds are tight and you have to think of ways to stretch your meager resources. [More]
