So those old-fashioned days are coming back.
Well, okay, so maybe we're not all making handmade stuff for Christmas,
but we're sure as heck buying the stuff by the truckload.
This is a fairly new phenomenon that has suddenly blanketed California over the last 10 or 15 years.
They call it Christmas Crafts Fairs.
This one was held last weekend in Auburn, but don't worry if you missed it.
We promise you there will be dozens more between now and Christmas.
You couldn't miss them if you tried to.
A couple of hundred years ago, people had handmade Christmas gifts like this because they didn't have anything else.
It's a little hard finding it came hard on the Chisholm Trail.
But now that Dodge City and Cheyenne and Hangtown all have shopping centers on every corner,
now suddenly everybody wants the sort of handmade stuff Great Grandpa had to make do with.
Great Grandpa, of course, would have preferred Kmart, but that's another story.
Like this lady from Sonora who makes handmade egg crates for Christmas.
Great Grandpa would have said, you're giving me what for Christmas?
Yeah, I predict that within three years now some leveraged buyout tycoon on Wall Street
will see how popular Great Grandpa's cast-offs have become now
and will start franchising the stuff like McDonald's.
Then guess what? Then suddenly we won't have anything to do with it anymore.
We'll all go back to Christmas shopping at Kmart.
The Americans are a very strange breed.
In Auburn, Bill Branch, KOBR 13 News.
And we've been doing some math up here. What is it 39 more days?