Look, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but Thanksgiving is past? How did that happen?

What this insidious passing of time says is that Christmas is less than four weeks away. Last night, I sat down to write out a list of what I’ll be getting everybody. This lasted until I eventually used up enough paper to deforest Canada and now I’m completely at a loss.

I love the holidays. I love everything about them. What I don’t love is gifting decisions.

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The day after Thanksgiving is better known by it’s “street name:” Black Friday. So called because Black Friday kicks off the holiday shopping season and thus, the day when all retailers hope their profit and loss statement ink turns from red to black based on mega sales.

Black Friday shoppers are the ones with hands paper cut and ink-stained from spending Thanksgiving day scouring the newspaper circulars looking for a chance to save two bucks on a Best of the Chico and the Man DVD box set.

They will wrestle $99.99 televisions and stereos into their carts, and body slam you for a Tickle Me Elmo.

In short, these are not people to be trifled with. They get the job done.

Let’s be frank. Exchanging gifts offers endless potential for tragic aggravation: teeming crowds, ransacked stores, busted budgets and the sinking feeling even as your receipt is being passed across the counter that you have bought the utterly wrong thing.

Even worse, perhaps, is receiving a gift that you wouldn’t buy for your worst enemy. Well, maybe for your worst enemy, but only if it’s on sale.

Evil. More galling yet, retailers act like they are your friends — wanting only to help you out of a tough gifting situation — when, in reality, they are the Devil.

Too many retailers take liberties with holiday shoppers’ complete lack of common sense. Come holiday time, suddenly any and everything is fair game for the “makes a great gift!” bait and switch. A box of holiday-shaped saltine crackers? Makes a great gift! A lint brush? Makes a great gift! Mouse trap? Makes a great gift!

Even merchants who have no business mucking around in the gifting biz just can’t resist getting in on the action. And that brings us the anti-fungal cream and personal care items at the pharmacy bedecked in ribbons and bows.

I don’t know about you, but if I had a problem with, say, nasal hair, the last thing I’d want is for it to be so noticeable that loved ones were giving me the Wet/Dry Nose Shaver as a gift. Isn’t that the kind of thing you’d rather take care of before it escalated to the point where your loved ones had to stage an intervention?

Any decent salesclerk with a even a modicum of decency should throw his body across an item like that before they’d let you actually PURCHASE one, let alone offer you a gift receipt.

Fortunately, even if you wouldn’t dream of leaving your warm bed on the Friday after Thanksgiving and fighting, cheek to jowl, for the first Holiday Barbie off the midnight Toys R Us truck, there is hope for you to build up your shopping muscle.

Shopping frenzy. Throughout the holiday season, retailers will helpfully open as early as 5:30 in the morning and stay open until the very last shopper has taken out a second mortgage on their house.

Only then do the shopkeepers get to close their doors, turn out the lights, and dance ’round the racks with joy because they can’t believe they actually unloaded those 1,300 tea-light toilet tissue dispensers they accidentally ordered.

Me, I consider myself to be completely immune to all this retail hype and shopping nonsense.

I’m not going to bite on one of those tea-light toilet tissue dispensers until they are at least 70 percent off.

I am about to send out the invites for our four-year-old’s birthday party next month. Christmas is just a few weeks later. Every mailbox brings a stack of catalogs. Every TV show is already embedded with dozens of toy commercials. Not even Ace of Cakes is sacred anymore.

We’re weeks away and the onslaught of “I wants” is almost more than I can handle. We’ve held her at bay with “we’ll put it on your list.” and “You can ask Santa.” We’ve let her practice her writing and drawing and scissor-skills by circling, cutting and pasting desired objets d’fun onto constuction paper. But, in this economy, we, like other families, are scaling back.

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Went shopping-alone- for The Girl’s pajamas the other night.

Know what I saw passing the girls’ section? Training bras that were somewhat (okay, ALOT) padded and had CUTIE in a playful arc across the bra cup spelled out in what looked to be a form of shiny rhinestone jewels. When I say girls, I mean in the 5-8 year range. Yeah, FIVE years old.

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It seems that our nation’s retailers and I have come to a complete and utter impasse as to what “back to school” entails.

Different ideas. I see it as an opportunity to send our students off to school freshly dressed, pressed, and appropriately outfitted to learn. Retailers apparently see it as an opportunity to outfit our nation’s daughters for stripper school.

Where, pray tell, have all the sweet little plaid skirts gone? The Mary Janes? The pinafores?

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