santa's elves do not shop at Michaels

I hesitated at the door. I had already been cut off in the parking lot and the aisles looked treacherous, women clutching 40% off coupons with a fortitude usually reserved for warfare.

I guess that's appropriate to some, those determined to lose their everloving minds during the holidays.

I guess I shouldn't expect much from Michaels. (Just ask Mrs. G.)

But I've been hunting for a pan for weeks now, the ever elusive mini-bundt pan, to bake little rum and gingerbread cakes for family and friends - oops, act surprised - and the Craft Store That Causes Psychosis had received new inventory, to suit my purposes.

I grabbed the pan and ran through a rat maze of aisles and boxes and wuzzits and whozits and assorted decorative shrapnel until I came to what appeared to be the end of the line. That is, until some very cranky, rather short woman peered over a cardboard kiosk, ready to bicker with me about who was rightfully there first, now that we had lines forming behind each of us.

Now, Reader, I pick my battles. If Cranky Grinch Lady thinks I am going to engage in her crazy on a perfectly sunny day in December, she is wrong. But if she thinks I am going to take the heat from the throngs behind me, she's certifiable.

After some verbal wrangling, I let CGL go ahead of me and suggested we all could take turns, getting some support from a gentleman behind me, regretfully sent into Michaels on an errand, and in charge of the people behind him, bitching and complaining.

We slowly moved forward as another register opened and the woman behind me starts asking - and please explain to me how I became Line Manager, in December, at Michaels - why we are in one big line, and were we specifically told to do it this way by the employees, and complaining. She began to interrogate me for the third time, even after I stooped to being curt with her, and I was ready to tell her to step right up and cut in front of the mob, but then I remembered my Invisible Cloak of Line Authority and realized my pan and I might never be heard of again.

I was done. I just stopped talking, and ignored her outright, which was hard to do. She tapped her foot, and kept complaining aloud - to me, to herself? - and I just stared at my pan, my precious pan, and wondered how my family would react if I came down with a case of seasonal agoraphobia.