Loose Cannon: Yuletide and Youth

The cockles of many a direct marketer’s heart were warmed this winter by online shopping’s reported fortunes. Doubtless some of the increase reflects the public’s ever-growing comfort with online commerce, and some of it reflects rank opportunism. For instance, Web-based DMers took advantage of a recent transit strike in New York by offering stranded, panic-stricken present buyers expedited delivery.

But the rise in online shopping has a dark side. Every step toward a fully Web-based holiday season heralds the decline of a time honored family tradition. I speak of the bonds formed between a grandparent and grandchild as they hit the bricks — or, as was more often the case, the polished marble floors — of department stores in a frenzy of Yuletide shoplifting.

I myself partook of this with my father’s father, H. Goniff Levey. At the height of his powers, there was none better at the so-called five-finger discount. It seemed Grandpa knew every trick, from using accomplices — both willing and unwilling — to create distractions, to rigging clothing up for maximum portability with minimum revealing bulges. Had he gone into foundation garment design, he could have made a fortune.

Grandpa even took advantage of my family’s tendency toward corpulence. In my pre-teen years, I was cherubic looking, and at Christmastime Grandpa would station me under store mistletoe displays. Saleswomen, full of holiday cheer and perhaps a few toots of employee-lounge bourbon, would swoop down to pinch my cheeks. This provided the old man with the few precious seconds he needed to sweep a display of Mont Blanc fountain pens into a false-bottom wrapped box he’d designed himself.

When I turned 13, a growth spurt elevated me to the decidedly un-cherubic height of six feet. Grandpa looked at me, visions of heisted fountain pens vanishing from his head, and proclaimed “Today, you are a man. Oh, well.”

But my newfound height was no deterrent to another of Grandpa’s favorite Yuletide activities — getting down on our hands and knees outside of retailers and searching for discarded receipts. If we found ones with prices near merchandise he’d lifted, Grandpa would cheerfully return the items for either cash or store credit. The latter was always a disappointment: For someone with Grandpa’s abilities, anything smaller than the then yet-to-be-invented wide-screen television was boostable. Who needed credit when the store was free?

During all of our expeditions together, we were only collared once, when I was six. We were halfway down the block from Macy’s, Grandpa’s false-bottom box laden with Bulova watches, when a rather substantial guard placed his hands on our necks and effortlessly lifted the two of us off the sidewalk.

“You seem to have forgotten something, such as a trip to the cashier,” the guard told Grandpa.

My grandfather leaned forward and engaged the guard in a cheery dialog. While I couldn’t hear everything, I swear that a word or two of Yiddish passed between them. This struck me as odd, given the guard’s distinctively Hibernian coloring. Regardless, at the end of the conversation the two shook hands, and Grandpa and I, and the box, continued down Seventh Avenue.

I asked Grandpa if I had just seen a Christmas miracle. “Don’t be a damned fool,” he replied, pulling a Bulova Chronograph out of his box and handing it to me. “What does this say?”

I had just learned to tell time, and was eager to show off my accomplishment. “It’s three-fifty P.M.,” I announced proudly.

“Right,” Grandpa replied. “Which means his shift is over in ten minutes. I explained that he could either spend the next two hours filling out paperwork, or that he could go home filled with an additional $50 of holiday cheer.”

“And did he?” I asked, with wide-eyed wonder at the workings of adults.

“No,” said Grandpa, “he got me up to an even hundred.”

I tell this story in light of an article that appeared in the Hunterton County Gazette, a small New Jersey newspaper. It seems that police recently arrested Pamela Carmody, a former school crossing guard, who told police that her bank card had been stolen, and that she shouldn’t be held responsible for nearly $500 in goods that had been charged to it in the days after its alleged loss.

Of course, the cops not only had videotape of her making the purchases, but found most of the items themselves wrapped under her Christmas tree. Carmody was charged with theft, providing false information to police and receiving unlawfully obtained goods. The police kept the items she had bought, which included DVDs and jewelry, as evidence. Grandpa would have had strong words for her, the only printable one of which would have been “amateur!”

But that would have been when he was younger. As he aged, Grandpa’s light fingers became leaden, and once I stopped going with him the arrests began to pile on. Toward the end of his days we spent so much time visiting him in jail that I began to believe Christmas presents came from men dressed in orange jumpsuits. When my family acquired its first color TV — legitimately, I might add — and I saw Santa Claus bedecked in bright red velvet, I spent hours fiddling with the set’s knobs, convinced the color was off.

I was at Grandpa’s bedside when he died, and at the moment of truth he grabbed my arm with a grip surprisingly strong for someone on the brink of eternity.

“Richutchka,” he said, using the affectionate diminutive of my name, “never forget. When the floorwalker grabs you, no matter what, you’re under 18.”

Twenty years later, those words have stood me in good stead. And I still mist over when I think of Grandpa and how today’s declines in retail traffic would have made our jaunts that much more difficult. Somehow, watching Uncle Herschel download names and Social Security numbers by the light of the fire just doesn’t have the same holiday feel.

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