I avoid retail and grocery stores in the remaining few days before Christmas in a show of solidarity and respect for the people who work there. People are going to go apeshit at both today. Some Christmas retail stories:
Best Christmas Eve story: 10 minutes before closing (5 pm), some asswipe goes to our TV section and carefully analyzes what features are on each display TV. The electronics chick is damn near freaking out because she has a big ass family gathering to attend and this clown didn't decide until about 5 minutes after closing to pick a 32" TV. So she breathes a sigh of relief, catches me to ask to ring this assfuck up (and I do because she had my back on occasion), and we wheel out the TV to this tiny ass late 80s model Honda. No way the TV could fit in even if we take the TV out of the box. The customer gets all pissy. The store manager walks outside and tells the customer that there is no way the TV can fit. So he swears at us, calls someone, and says that he'll need to get a truck. The store manager and I wait. It was about an hour (about 6:30 pm) until a crappy ass truck shows up. The guy is just swearing constantly, the store manager and I are pissed as fuck, and we load up the TV and he peeled out. Wasn't until about 7:15 pm Christmas Eve until I was at home. Goddamn, that pissed me off.
Best Christmas story: The very same retailer (different year) wanted to have some people work Christmas day to clean up the carnage. It was a 10 am to 6 pm shift. It was volunteer work (you'd still get paid) but nobody was forced to go in. I made the grave mistake of mentioning this to my parents, who got pissy that I wasn't going to go in. I got nagged at constantly until I relented. It was just shift manager, some lazy sack of shit who owed lots of back child support (the only reason he was in), and myself. When it was 6 pm, the store manager said "Well, there's still all of this straightening that needs to be done, let's take a 30 minute break and keep going." I didn't get done until about 10 pm. I was thoroughly pissed off because we worked our asses off and I had a 6 am shift the next day. I was able to get in maybe 4 hours of sleep. I only received Super Mario Sunshine as a gift so no real rush to get into that game, in hindsight.