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

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 I go up to the front of the store to buy a gift certificate, where the line is almost to the back of the store. As I am standing there, I start to smell a smell coming from the baby's pants in front of me. The mom keeps saying, "We are close to the front; just another minute, baby." The baby is screaming and yelling, and the smell is horrible. I start thinking "is it worth the wait?" I regrettably decide it is. So I get through the line and start to realize that it has almost been an hour. I am walking towards where I am supposed to meet my friend and I remember about one more gift I need to get. I start walking almost running, through the mall to get to the music store. I get there and see I am the only one in the store. I am very surprised. I find the CD I want and go check out, then head back to

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 815
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)