RESOLVED – To bring back the Christmas Club. I pissed off Best Buy when I did it before.

If you’ve never heard of the “Christmas Club,” it’s a concept that was tethered in an era when banks gave you a toaster for opening a savings account in their institution.

And I want to try the “Christmas Club” this year. In fact, I’ve already picked up my first “ornament,” shall we say.

A Christmas Club is a savings gimmick where you tithe away a portion of your paycheck or your earnings, and keep doing so until around late November, when all that savings comes back to you and you use it to purchase a nice gift or gifts. Sometimes it’s part of a payroll deduction, other times it’s simply socking away a few dollars in a home hiding spot. 

And you must not touch that money for any reason until after Thanksgiving at the earliest. No excuses of “Oh, I’ll put the money back later in the week,” because you know and I know that you won’t do so.

I did this once before – a long, long time ago – and it pissed off Best Buy. 

Let me explain.

It’s Thanksgiving, maybe the year 2006 if I remember correctly. And for the entire year prior to that day, I had purchased $25 Best Buy gift cards. One by one. $25 here, $25 there. Some were shaped like their little yellow pricetags, others were just generic Best Buy cards. By November, I had at least $800 worth of BB gift cards – 32 of them, to be precise. 

And on Black Friday of that year, I waited in the cold and chill outside Best By in Crossgates Mall. I already knew what I wanted. At the time, I had my first car, a 1991 Pontiac 6000 (the one I took from my Grandma Betty because a 92-year-old woman with cataracts should not have a valid Massachusetts driver’s license). The car stereo was a standard-issue AC Delco deck with the luxury cassette player attachment. 

At the time, I had an iPod and wanted to hear my music when I drove, and not limit myself to whatever FM or AM station the 6 could pick up. Best Buy had an Alpine car stereo with an iPod tuner attachment – the iPod could reside in the glove box, and you could control the iPod through the Alpine’s face plate head shell. Look, it’s 2006, it’s not like a 91 Pontiac would have Sirius XM built in.

So I saved my cards. Every time I went to Best Buy, I picked up a $25 gift card. If I did someone a favor or helped them out with a project, I’d ask for them to pick me up a $25 GC from BB.

And sure enough, when the doors to Best Buy opened up on that chilly Black Friday morning, I had those cards in my hand like I was Gambit buying gifts for Wolverine and Deadpool. I went all the way to the back of the store, picked out the Alpine deck I wanted, and confirmed that BB could install the deck right then and there. They said they could do that, no problem.

Total came to about $600 for the deck and the installation.

“Do you take Best Buy cards?” I asked with a smile.

“Sure we do,” the salesperson said. 

“Okay,” I grinned. ”So that’ll be about 26 of these cards with tax … “

At that point, the salesperson saw the cards and looked at me as if I was buying a new car with a suitcase of $5 bills. And the salesperson looked back at the long, long line of customers trying to get their Christmas shopping done. And after a few tense moments, where I thought I’d get the old “come on, this must be a joke, right?” glare from the Best Buy blueshirt …

The salesperson just sighed, said, “Ah, what the fuck, Merry Christmas,” and dutifully entered every single BB gift card in the register until the purchase was made. ”What kind of car do you have?”

“A classic. It’s a vintage sedan. It’s a Pontiac.”

“Oh, cool, like a Trans Am or a Firebird?”

“No, man, I wish. It’s a 6000.”

The salesperson looked up at me. ”Wait, you’re putting this deck in a beater with a heater?”

I smiled. ”Yes, I am.”

Again, another tense staredown. Then … “Ah, fuck it. I gotta make sure the guys in the garage have a GM bracket attachment so your new deck will fit properly.”

And after waiting for their techs to install the Alpine deck – and to snake the connecting wire through my glove box to stealth away the iPod – I was on my way. Christmas from me to me.

And all because I pulled off the old “Christmas Club” savings trick.

So I’m going to try this again for 2024. No, I’m not going back to $25 gift cards at Best Buy. But I am going to sock away a sizeable amount each month and hope that by Black Friday 2024 … I’ll have a nice meaty amount for maybe a top-of-the-line camera or a waycool purchase for the girlfriend or something else of that nature. 

And there’s no better time to do this … than today.