Everyone says that Christmas time is the season of giving. To me, Christmas time is the season of buying books. Lots and lots and lots and… you get the point.
For the past two years, three of my sisters and I take one day leading up to Christmas to go on a book excursion. We start our adventure early in the morning and pile into a car and crank up the music. We drive for close to an hour to a book nerd’s dream come true: the Dollar Book Swap. This place is basically a warehouse with shelves on shelves of all sorts of books: fiction, non-fiction, children's books, YA novels, history books, books in different languages. You name it, they have it. And the best part of the place is that all these books are only a few bucks. You could leave the warehouse with a cart full of books and not spend more than $100. If you know how expensive books can be, you know just how amazing this is.
My sisters and I tend to spend a couple hours browsing through the shelves. A lot of the time we are looking for a specific book that we can’t find anywhere else. Sometimes we find a book that we have been meaning to read or a book that we forgot how much we loved growing up and add it to our cart. A lot of the times we will be pointing out books to each other saying “Hey, didn’t you want this book?” or “I think you’ll like this one” and help each other add to our collection. Other times, though, it is every woman for herself. We are all trying to create our own libraries and even have clamps to mark which books are ours. As such, there are books that we absolutely love that we want to own and have our clamp mark on. When there are multiple of us looking for the same book, it is whoever finds it first gets it. I have lost many fights for a book. But at the end of our shopping spree at Dollar Book Swap we all come out with an incredible haul. However, this is only just the beginning of our adventures.
After Dollar Book Swap, we drive in the direction of Mason to hit one of our Half Price Books and our favorite place to eat: Moe’s Grill. Depending on the time, we will eat at Moe’s first or we will head to Half Price. Either way, we will spend close to another hour browsing through Half Price to add to our collection. We usually spend a lot of our time in the YA novel section where most of our favorite authors from growing up currently reside.
Usually after this Half Price, we might head to another Half Price close to our neighborhood. But this depends on time. We try to go to more than one Half Price though because they have different selections. One of the Half Price stores has a better manga section but might not have many of the other authors we are looking for, while the other has every author we are looking for but no manga. It’s always hit or miss at Half Price, so we try to go to several to increase our chances of finding what we want.
At the end of the day, we try to go to Barnes & Noble. Often, we don’t leave this store with as many books just because the books are regularly priced and tend to be expensive. But we usually find books that recently came out here, or we are able to buy the next five volumes of a favorite manga series since we usually can’t do that anywhere else.
By the end of the day, the trunk of my sister’s car is full of bags and stacks of books. By the time we drive home, the books are all mixed up that we can’t tell whose pile is whose. So we all work together to carry all our books inside in one trip. We then head to one of my sisters’ rooms and pass out the books, take off the price stickers, and talk about what we bought and why. But the best part each time is to count how many books we’ve bought. The first adventure we had we got over 90 books. Last time we got a little over 100 books. We always try to break our record, so this Christmas we might be looking at 110 books.
This is probably one of my favorite times I get to spend with my sisters. Most of my sisters are older than me and are moving out and starting their own lives and families. Because of that, there aren’t many opportunities to hang out. That’s why I look forward to Christmas season when we clear our schedules for one day to hang out, go to lunch together, and share our love of books.
Christmas is the time of giving, and what better thing to give than a book that we have been meaning to read or a book that we forgot how much we loved growing up, and add it to our cart; spending time with loved ones surrounded by books.