I check the calendar. Sixty-two days between now and yet another Black Friday, 65 to Cyber Monday, 96 shopping days till Christmas. We’re heading into what Sell Siders refer to as the “Hard Eight,” the eight most critical weeks of the year — make-or-break time. This morning Santa, undaunted by the deepening recession, sent an advance team to scope out the Magnificent Mile, where his workers will wrap strands of white lights around the trees that line the avenue. Across the country, faux retail villages and long-in-the-tooth suburban malls are also preparing to spruce themselves up for the holidays. Everybody’s nervous-plus, all braced for what forecasters say will be the least merry retail season in memory. But the show will go on as scheduled. Selling seasons wait for no man or woman to give a thumbs up or thumbs down, nor for any uptick in consumer confidence. Buying seasons just come and go.

More than a few have come and gone since the evening I helped a Target customer track down that Jack LaLanne power juicer with whisper-quiet motor. Or that afternoon when we watched as Linda turned left and right, trying to decide which little black dress was most age- and occasion- appropriate. Over the course of those selling and buying seasons, strangers, friends, and family members acquired an assortment of things they thought they needed or wanted and many things they neither needed nor wanted but bought anyway. A three-pack of men’s boxers, bound for Cozumel. A jar of reasonably priced undereye concealer, plus rewards points. An elusive pair of Onitsuka Tigers, white with red and blue stripes. Ugg boots, sworn never to be acquired, then acquired anyway. An OXO turkey baster, ergonomically designed to fit the hand and pleasure the eye. Was it the in-store music that sold us on those things? A beam of halogen light precisely aimed? Were we grabbing at romance? Fending off boredom? Or did some Sell Side Svengali make us do it?

Over the course of the buying seasons past, we roamed the Magnificent Mile and traveled to sundry corners of the Sell Side: a huge showcase for advanced technology systems that keep track of trillions of kachings; a campus lab where a computer monitor revealed the region of the brain that glows when threatened by a disturbing commercial; a dank hallway on Canal Street from whence we were chased back to the land of the aboveboard. Along the way a motley band of shoppers, snoops, merchants, marketing gurus, scholars, and scolds had their say. Many claimed insight into the why, how, what, where, and when we buy, yet none could connect all the dots. Mary Douglas, the celebrated anthropologist, declared in her classic The World of Goods: “It is extraordinary to discover that no one knows why people want goods.”

Why, then, even go to the trouble of trying?

Well, like it or not, whether you’re a classic tightwad or a romantic spendthrift, shopping and buying are central to the well-being and destiny of the Consumers’ Republic. Our economy, culture, and social order are built around the Buy. For better and worse, America is, on balance, what it buys: until now, gas guzzlers and McMansions and $350 sunglasses that too often we couldn’t afford, and now no-name diapers and plain-vanilla gadgets that do only what they’re supposed to, and at nominal cost. Our values are also reflected in how we choose to purchase things – as a nation we can elect to pay as we go, or play kick-the-bills down-the-road, sometimes for months and years, sometimes for a generation or two. What’s unconscionable about the latter course is that our grandchildren will be the ones to pay….

You are what you buy, you are what you don’t buy — enough already! There are no airtight Unified Buy Theories. There are, though, some final takeaways, and now that we’ve arrived at the closeout it’s time to lay them out. Throughout this shopping trip, I’ve been hoarding certain receipts: memorable moments, snatches of testimony by those who altered the way I thought about the Buy going in. As I rummage through these mementos, I find yet more evidence that Buy Scolds fire without aiming. Sure, we make countless Buys deserving of scorn – impulsive, compulsive, irrational, just plain stupid and wasteful. But we also make good Buys that deserve to be celebrated. Memo to Buy Scolds: it isn’t that we buy, it’s what we buy that matters in the end. Here, then, are four categories of Buys worth making, weather-proof Buys no matter the economic climate….