Spicing up the season

The US holiday shopping season got off to an ugly start when a shopper pepper-sprayed other bargain hunters and robbers shot at shoppers to steal their Black Friday purchases, police said Friday. Up to 20 people were injured after a woman used pepper spray in California to get an edge on competitors. On the other side of the continent, off-duty officers in North Carolina used pepper spray to subdue rowdy shoppers waiting for consumer electronics. This sort of madness in the month before Christmas (as well as the overspending and the debt buildup) is why this year, I'm making more cost-effective gifts out of what I already have. Home-made gifts are said to be better because you took the time to make them yourself instead of spending inflated sums of money on the latest smartphone or an unwieldy 50" plasma/LCD TV that was made in China by some dirt-poor factory worker who was hired for next to nothing and can't afford food for the family. In other news, a British mother was arrested after police investigated a Youtube video of her making racist comments on a London tram.