All I can do is ask myself every year "why do I wait?" Every year I tend to wait to do all my Christmas shopping until the night before. I do not know why I do it, but I do. Christmas Eve of 2001 was the worst I have ever been through.
             It is Christmas Eve 2001; I am walking out to my car to go Christmas shopping with my best friend. It feels like minus 10 degrees, and so I let my car warm up, which takes thirty minutes because of the blistering cold. As I sit there, I continue to ask myself "why did I wait until now?" As soon as my car is warm, I head over to my best friend's house with no problems. I pull up in front of his house and he gets in the car and says; "Here we go again." As you can tell, we have done this before.
             We head out on I-70 west towards Kansas City from the Woods Chapel exit. We decide to try to go to Oak Park Mall, Thinking that there will be less traffic. After about 45 minutes, we get off the freeway onto Metcalf Ave. and head down to Oak Park Mall. We pull into the mall with no problems, but the only parking spot we can find is all the way around on the backside. As we walk inside working our way through the swarms of people, we both decide to split up and get our gifts and then meet back. He had to get three gifts; I had to get five. We both decided to meet back in thirty minutes at that spot. Well, we found out that thirty minutes was not enough. I had been able to get two gifts and he was able to get one. So we decide another hour would be ok.
             As I walk to get my last gift, I hear a lady say that there is gridlock outside. I think to myself "oh god, please no. Why today?" Hoping that it is not true, I head to my last store. As I make my way through Old Navy looking for a coat for my girlfriend, all I hear are people talking about the parking lot. To make the situation worse, they had sold out of the coat I wanted to get for her. So
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