"We've been manipulated into expecting that what we buy can fill our innermost voids, regulate our emotions, repair our moods, or provide us with a "perfect" image...

...shopping is a way we search for ourselves and our place in the world. Though often conducted in the most public of spaces, it's essentially an intimate and personal experience - as we taste, touch, sift, consider, and talk our way through myriad possibilities. Shopping involves searching not only externally, as in a store, but internally, through memory and desire. It's a vehicle for self-expression, self-definition, creativity, even healing - an interactive process in which we dialogue with people, places, things, and parts of ourselves.To have a good, rather than a goods, holiday, remember first of all that the good life comes from doing things, not from having them."