Lead Me Not Into Temptation...

I have concluded that giving up shopping in the fall, as the holiday season approaches, should entitle me to a special reward. I have my resolve tested on a daily basis just going to the mailbox and getting the mail. We get a lot of catalogs here. I mean a tremendous amount. Who knows how many innocent trees have perished only to end up in the glossy pages of a Restoration Hardware or PB Teen catalog?

I don't want to bore you but I'll give you a small sampling: We are continuously courted by Land's End, Cabelas, American Girl, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, J. Jill, Levengers, Drs. Foster & Smith, Lego, Williams Sonoma, Christian Book Distributors, Art Supply Warehouse, Smith & Hawken and more. They are a tenacious bunch. Even though I haven't purchased anything from their catalogs in ages, if ever, they just keep appearing in my mailbox, hoping against hope that I will break down and buy something, anything!

I used to love getting the Sunday paper and reading the ads that accompanied it. Then I calculated the amount of time wasted looking at stuff that I would probably never buy. When we were demoted to a really poor paper deliverer who forgot us some days and missed our driveway others (what fun is it to read a soggy newspaper, when you discover it in the snowbank two weeks later?) I finally bid the paper adieu. Less temptation, more time on Sunday afternoons. Hmmm... I was on to something.

I have contacted the mail preference service that gets your name off the junk mail lists but somehow I manage to worm my way back in to their good graces and the catalogs return. Like a bad toothache they just keep coming back. Some items offered are so expensive as to be ridiculous. Who needs a $1,000.00 fountain pen I ask you? Some catalogs are humorous, like the Duluth Trading Company with their plumbers "bottom" t-shirts. All are nonessential and yet I have a hard time throwing them away. What if I want something from one of them? Once I discovered an entertaining DVD set "Backstairs at the White House" that our family really enjoyed. I'd have never known it existed if I hadn't seen it in a catalog.

Still, I need to ditch the catalogs lest they weaken my resolve. I'm throwing up the white flag and surrendering! I will have to send my children to the mailbox until the holidays are over. I don't know if I can resist the temptations that await within!