Consuming Passion
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 14, 2013

“What if I look like mutton dressed as sheep?” I ask the lissom sales girl. It’s a  legitimate question: I’m trying on a frock in attention-seeking scarlet. Actually, it’s more a shade of watermelon. I’m worried I’ll look like one in it.

She looks at me blankly and continues preening herself in the mirror next to mine. She’s been stalking round the shop on her leg-stilts like some exotic wading bird, a riot of colour in flowing jungle-print. I crane my neck because she is wearing this summer’s four-inch platforms and I’m straight from the beach in my purple thongs, circa 2010.

“Go on,” she coaxes. “Spoil yourself – it’s Christmas!”

And there it is: an invitation to conspicuous consumption. Her words stick to my brain like cheap tinsel puttied to shop windows. I agree with her anyway: “I’ll take it!”

“It fits you like a glove,” she calls over her shoulder as she heads briskly over to the till. I give myself a last once-over in the mirror, unsure whether to believe her. The dress does fit rather snugly (perhaps not so much glove as fireman’s gauntlet). I hand her my Mastercard and she plucks it daintily from me with a well-practiced flourish.

Clutching my gilt-edged carry-bag, $249 poorer, I exit the shop giddy with my impulse buy. I am high on shopper’s euphoria.

By the time I’ve rounded up a BBQ chicken and a 12-pack of toilet rolls at Coles, I have dress-buyer’s remorse. I already own frocks I love more than this clingy one. I always feel garish in red. Why blow $250 on something I’m too timid to wear?

Trudging home, I observe my fellow shoppers too, are weighed down by their new purchases. Up ahead, I notice a handsome woman with a platinum helmet of hair bearing down on me. Her arms are strung with dress-shop bags, their (glamorously) sharp corners bouncing against her legs as she sashays through the arcade.

Can we pass without colliding? Her gaze is somewhere above my head, so making eye contact with this superior being is out of the question. Sensing an imminent sideswipe, I step to my left. She marches past me unimpeded (and ungrateful). It is a vulgar display.

I wonder if my haughty friend is annoyed I didn’t step out of her way sooner. Perhaps she was wanted my envy for her shopping spree. All I sensed was an aggressive attempt at oneupmanship.

By the time I get home, I have concocted a rationale for my own splurge. My red dress reclines artfully on the bed while I rummage through my wardrobe  for shoes to match. 

For a few moments, I am again drunk with pleasure, but then my satisfaction turns to something ugly: a slavish craving for more. I want the tan-coloured wedges I spotted last week. Should I splash out and buy the filigree necklace I’ve been lusting after all year? I’ve waited long enough, haven’t I?

Part of me hankers for reckless extravagance. Or perhaps it’s schadenfreude – that same perverse satisfaction I get from reading New Weekly in the hairdresser and seeing Miley Cyrus being shunned for trying too hard to be controversial.

Had I had access to money as a teenager, I too would have succumbed to shopping gluttony and bought myself a pair of Reebok hi-top sneakers and a perm. Instead, I spent my $12 pocket money on McCalls’ dress-making patterns. I spread those brown paper cut-outs all over the loungeroom floor. Then I tacked together my version of the flouncy denim skirt Brooke Shields wore while shipwrecked in The Blue Lagoon.  Sewing those crooked seams on mum’s old Husqvarna took the best part of a Saturday. But I can still recall the kick I got out of looking bespoke the entire summer of 1980.

Strangely, I cannot remember a single Christmas present I received as a kid. And yet I envied my well-off friends their new Starfire white rollerskates and Nintendo Gameboys. My temptation now is to spoil my offspring. Last week I asked my teenager his favourite thing about Christmas. I expected ‘presents’ to top his list. “The Santa Claus footprints you used to dust around the fireplace with icing sugar” came the reply. (He’d got wise one year and licked the floor).  

I still get a childish thrill from hauling our dusty box of Christmas decorations up from the garage. I lift lopsided stars and strange glittery creatures from their tissue paper nests and tell my kids how old they were when they made them. They beg me to make shortbread so they can use the reindeer cookie-cutters and sneak glace cherries from the bowl. We go for night drives with all the windows down counting how many houses are strung with fairy lights. It’s the lead-up to Christmas I love – the day itself is always an anti-climax.

Oh, and whatever happened to my new red dress? Actually I bought it last Christmas. I still haven’t plucked up the courage to become a scarlet woman.