Cross Border Christmas Shopping

Ah! What do you get when you mix a minivan, four women and November?

The yearly trip to Port Huron for Christmas shopping!

MY FEET ARE SOOO SORE!

We live only an hour and a half from Port Huron, Michigan and my friends and I decided we 'needed' a weekend away from our men. So! Saturday morning we loaded small suitcases into Sarah's mini van, got our Timmies in the drive through and off we barrelled to shop, shop, shop! (Timmies are take out coffee's from Tim Horton's, the famous coffee shop of Ontario, named after it's creator the late NHL Hockey player.)

And... I got almost all my Christmas shopping done! Yaay!

Why do I shop there rather than locally you ask?

I do shop locally. But, even factoring in the exchange rate on the money; I can buy Ontario eggs in Michigan for more than a dollar less than here. I can buy better, nicer bath sheets at half the price that I can here. I can buys toys for our little ones way cheaper. The result is our limited dollars go farther and Christmas will be more bountiful. (Our products are mostly manufactured in the same countries anyway and they pretty much all come to this continent by ship, don't they?)

I believe in shopping locally... I do and we spend ninety-nine percent of our money here. I believe in buying most of our food produced in Ontario, Canada. I will put down the grown in Peru fruit and buy things grown closer to home and I think we all should. You know, green footprint and all....

We can only go so far and do so much before we cut off our noses to spite our faces.

We work damned hard all our lives to get what little we can to spend the last quarter of our lives in retirement doing what we want instead of doing what our boss, our spouse or the kids want and it comes down to this:

If I want to spend my money in Port Huron... I will!

Merry Christmas!