Hole-ier than thou

Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday. Are we done yet?How many emails flooded your inbox with deals and steals, holiday blow-outs, huge discounts, cool exclusives, free gifts, special savings codes and all manner of other inducements to spend, spend spend?Did every site you ever browsed, let alone bought something from, bury you in an avalanche of offers?Did you resist?I resisted the entire weekend. I was so danged proud of myself. I was just polishing my anti-consumerist halo when it happened. It was Tuesday morning. I succumbed.It was not my fault. Really. It was a chain of events that led me, inexorably, to dip my toe in our capitalist ocean. First, that morning I went to my closet to find this lovely sweater I hadn’t worn in a while that used to be my favorite. It was hanging right next to one of the cedar things you buy for closets so that moths don’t eat that lovely sweater that used to be your favorite. The moths didn’t get the message. Or they have learned to love the smell of cedar.Upon close examination, I found four holes in the sweater, including three in the right shoulder area, which I guess was extra tasty. I put on an inferior, less-loved sweater and headed down to my writing room to work. Can I help it that right there, in my inbox, was a message from a clothing company with a 25 percent off/ free shipping offer...for SWEATERS? That’s number two.How could I not look?And then, numero tres, on that very first page--the first page of what were more than a dozen pages of sweaters, mind you-- was a sweater that looked just like my now moth-eaten favorite sweater. Only better.Did I want to chat with the pop-up person who could answer any questions about this item? I did not. I just wanted to click and buy.Which is what I did. Then I searched for new cedar thingees for the closet and bought those.Forgive me.