Mark LaFlamme’s List of Alternatives to Holiday Shopping:

Drinking.

Ha! No, I kid. Surely there are plenty of things to do if you’re trying to avoid the stores today. Unfortunately, none of them involve actually leaving your home. Go outside, and you’re bound to get mowed over in one form or another. You’ll be run down by a speeding minivan driven by a woman who looks like a crankhead on cappuccino and with a finger stuck in a light socket. You’ll be trampled by a large woman with gritted teeth and serrated elbows as she hoofs her way to the mall. You’ll be run over by the train you voluntarily hurled yourself in front of because that traffic jam was lasting longer than childbirth.

Where holiday shopping is concerned, the stereotypes are dead-on. If I have to go to a department store or mall, I secretly wish the place was occupied by the flesh-eating zombies from “Dawn of the Dead,” rather than the hip-checking, aisle-cramming, desperation-smelling hordes of professional looters.

I shan’t go on and on about it, because love and loathing of the post-Thanksgiving crunch has been expressed in every way. I just wanted to list these helpful alternatives for those of you trying to stay out of the sweaty orgy of merchandise and shopping carts. There has to be more to do than sit back and wait for tantalizing details of the first catfight between soccer moms at JC Penney. And there is:

Drinking.

Again, I kid! I’m certainly not going to encourage anybody to hole up inside their homes like hibernating beasts with crumpled Christmas lists and bottles of absinthe. I’m going to encourage them to come over to my house with those items, instead. We’ll play quarters and watch movies with shootouts and car chases. We’ll sing drinking songs and raise our fists in defiance to the robotic hordes who funnel their way to the malls every late November like lemmings streaming to the sea.

We’ll punch each other in the shoulders and howl with laughter at juvenile jokes. We’ll call our henpecked friends when they get back from shopping with their wives and say: “How were the sales out there today, Sally?” Then we’ll hang up and howl with laughter some more.

I look forward to meeting these new friends. I look forward to the earnest camaraderie and the collective aversion to the commercially driven frenzy of holiday shopping.

I look forward to seeing these friends again two days before Christmas, when we’re the only people left in the stores, sobbing, frantic and truly desperate because we haven’t bought one thing for our loved ones – and man, are we in trouble.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.