In the wake of my disastrous shopping spree and with Christmas only two weeks away, I turned to the one person in the universe who I still believed could right practically any wrong (and the only person, besides mustachioed TV magician Doug Henning, who could make genuine magic happen): Santa Claus. I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote Santa a detailed, irony-free missive that was no less than seven single-spaced pages in length, describing what had befallen me at the department store on the previous Saturday morning. Though I harbored some doubts about Santa’s existence, as any discerning…