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It's that time of year again, folks. The time to open your wallets, break open the piggy banks, and succumb to the year's biggest shopping season. You knew it was coming: the bustling crowds, the annoying traffic, the pressure to find every gift on your list, huge credit card bills, and a giant black hole in your bank account that seems to suck the money out of it as soon as you deposit it. Yes, the holiday season is upon us once again.

On one hand, Christmas is a joyous holiday, filled with cheer and good spirits. We spend time in front of our television sets watching the much-anticipated Christmas specials that they show every year, building snowmen, listening to Christmas carolers, and decorating our dwellings with festive decorations and lights. Then, we top it all off by packing the family into the car and making the trip to grandma's house for a delicious feast.

On the other hand, it's also the only time of year that I dread shopping. It's the time of year that seems as if everybody and his or her mother are out on the road, and traffic seems to increase exponentially. What once was a fifteen-minute drive now becomes a half hour. When you finally reach your local shopping mall, you spend twenty or thirty minutes driving around the parking lot looking for a place to park. All the while, hoping your festive holiday music will drown out the sound of blaring horns and raging drivers as they fight over the closest parking spot. When you finally get inside the mall or specialty store, you pray that the chaos will somehow stay outside.

Then you look around and realize that your prayers have probably fallen on deaf ears. As you scramble through the stores, dodging carts and giant bags filled with merchandise, snatching up gifts for loved ones and co-workers, you become overjoyed at the possibility that your shopping is almost complete. Then you see the lines. It seems that no matter what store you go into during the holiday season, you're faced with the dreaded checkout lines. They're not short, either, not even the express lanes. For each checkout stand, it looks like two dozen people are waiting to make their purchases. Not only that, but you know whichever line you go into, is going to have someone in it who decides to hold the line up. Whether it's someone too busy texting or chatting on a cell phone to put their items on the counter in a timely manner, someone who needs a price check or replacement item, or someone complaining about their receipt,

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