Serendipity and Black Friday

Having now had swine flu and seasonal flu in the last month I've had lots of time to catch up on my movie watching. When I came home sick the other day and the weather man was predicting snow I decided to have a Christmas movie marathon. I started with some of the more traditional like Miracle on 34th Street and The Santa Clause and a few others and then started on to the less traditional. I seem to watch Serendipity around this time of year and can't really decide if its a Christmas movie or a regular movie. The menu is a giant snowflake, it is mostly based in December and seems to involve many trips to the retail shops for Christmas shopping and lots of snow... but then it does not center around some type of holiday disaster, it could be set in any time of year and if I worked in a movie shop I would recommend it to viewers year round. Just wondering.

I've decided that I want to go Black Friday shopping this year. I've worked it once but I've never actually participated in the shopping mayhem. I've been looking up advertisements online. My problem with Christmas shopping is that most the people I shop for I don't have advanced plans as to exactly what I want to buy them. Pretty much every year my strategy is to start by buying the one or two things I know for sure I am buying and while I'm getting those ones I browse and get a few ideas for other people and if something really jumps out at me then I do a little investigating and I pretty much continue this cycle until I've finished my holiday shopping. I don't usually end up with too many impulse purchases so I've never really felt the need to change the cycle but this doesn't seems to be a good strategy for Black Friday shopping. There are very good sales so the ability to get as much shopping done as possible would be a good thing that just brings me back to how do I decide what to buy for everyone?

On a side note- I used to have this pair of shoes that I really liked. I think everyone goes through a few favorite pair of shoes. Its been about two years since I last saw those shoes, I seemed to have lost them when I moved to Utah from Seattle and I checked a few places to replace them but never had luck so I moved onto better shoes and never really looked back. I went to the store the other day for some Halloween supplies and there were my shoes. I tried them on again for old times sake and they fit great. I kinda think I need to buy them again. (also you could claim serendipity in randomly finding them again...)