MARK MY WORD: SANTA MUST TAKE A BACK SEAT WHEN SHOPPING

Santa may get all the hugs, but it's Mrs. Claus who buys all those presents.

Most husbands leave the Christmas shopping to their wives. It's foreign territory to men, who don't know how to navigate their way through any store that doesn't sell power tools.

They haven't a clue what to get their own children. Just buying presents for their wives can be more challenging than a trek to the North Pole with sled dogs.

Part of the problem is that most men never look at all those store circulars with the brightly colored pictures of merchandise crammed on every page.

We see them fall out of the newspaper as we reach for the sports section. But we never really glance at all the store items.

We don't make lists either. Santa may check the list, but you can be certain it's Mrs. Claus that made it.

Go to any store and you'll see female shoppers standing in the aisles, reading their Christmas shopping lists and crossing off items as they throw them in their carts.

My wife, Joni, makes her lists on the fronts of opened envelopes. The bigger the envelope, the larger the list can be.

Last Sunday, I accompanied Joni and a female friend on a Christmas shopping pilgrimage to buy toys for Becca, as well as for friends' and relatives' children.

I quickly discovered that every mom in Cape Girardeau had the same itinerary we did.

We pushed our carts up one aisle and down the next. We were caught in some type of slow-motion exercise program, an army of shoppers, cart to cart, winding our way through the toy-shelved maze.

To a guy, this seems like a confusing way to shop. When men want to buy jeans, for example, they head right to the rack. They don't stop to look at ties or socks or jackets or anything else.

Women, on the other hand, prefer to go down every aisle. They might go in a store to buy jeans and come away with a doll house. In either case, they would consider it a good purchase.

On Sunday, as we inched along the aisles of one store, row upon row of Batman and Robin dolls stared at us from a top shelf.

There were Barbie dolls everywhere, and enough accessories to serve a whole planet of very tiny people.

The store was stacked full of toys.

I would have had to have spent a whole month in the store to take it all in.

It's different with female shoppers. They have a special shopping sense that allows them to see that Princess Barbie buried at the back of the shelf behind the 500 Tropical Splash barbies.

They also remember what that doll was selling for at 900 other stores they visited in the last month.

If a guy goes into a store, he'll just buy the Barbie doll.

But women won't. They'll comparison shop.

This means, I discovered, that you can't just do all your shopping at one store. You have to visit every store.

At that point, you'll probably return to the first store because it had the best price. So what if you saved less than a dollar? It's the principle that counts.

Santa couldn't operate this way. He would never be able to fill his sleigh in time for Christmas deliveries.

But clearly Mrs. Claus can handle all that shopping. I'm not so sure about the reindeer.

Mark Bliss is a member of the Southeast Missourian news staff.