SAVE BIG MONEY, USE MY SYSTEM

In a couple of words, I call it Calendar (or time) Shifting. This is especially useful if you have children that are too small to know anything about time or just about anything else except for maybe Dora the Explorer. We all know that Black Friday or Boxing Day is the best time to shop to get bargains and the worst time is when merchants know they have you by the short hairs on Christmas Eve. Why pay twice as much for anything just to give gifts on an arbitrary date? Did you know that Jesus was NOT born on December 25th but that this date was selected (ripped off) from the Pagans who celebrated the Winter Solstice also known as Saturnalia? So would it make any difference if you exchanged gifts and bought decorations AFTER Christmas? Think of the money saved. Christmas cards and lights 50% off ! Free trees... just haul it away. All kinds of after-Christmas sales.

This works for many holidays. Halloween comes to mind. I would not try this with the Super Bowl and the whacked-out prices they charge for big screen TVs prior to the game. Even if you recorded the game on your Comcast DVR and bought and hooked up your 60" Plasma the following day, someone would spill the beans and tell you the final score and spoil it. So, unless you live in a cave in Afghanistan, you have to pay full price for this one.

There are others and I am sure that if you use your imagination you will save thousands. It's easy... and you can save more than money, your sanity can also be preserved. NEVER go to Disney World the last week before school starts. Go a couple of weeks after it starts and pull your kids out of class. They're not learning anything anyway packed 40 to a classroom with a non-performing teacher who is still using lesson plans from the days of the Carter administration. Sure, Miss Frumple will be pissed for a while but really, is your kid's GPA in 4th grade really going to follow him or her to Harvard?

There are many other examples... the Academy Awards springs to mind. Why stay up all night to listen to overpaid cry-baby politically astute starlets tearily blame the Bush administration for the Famine in Darfur (ask them where that is, exactly) or listen to the litany of "I would like to thank our producer Mr. Shapiro, without his brilliance I would not be here tonight accepting this award on behalf of all the animals and plants of the world who....." So... Time/calendar shift... Record the whole thing... get up the next morning, make yourself a big cup of coffee.. pick up the remote and fast forward through everything that sucks (80%). Watch the cleavage parade on the Red Carpet (my favorite), skip the technical awards for best lighting in an animated documentary, and get to the Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress (ever notice that male and female actors want to be called actors until the time of the Oscars then it's OK to have two categories?) and of course my favorite category, Best drunken acceptance speech given by an airhead who thinks she is Albert Schweitzer.

Shift we can believe in. Thanksgiving is just around the corner.