During the holidays, it’s every man for himself

There must be hundreds of thousands of parking spaces in Dallas. They’re literally everywhere, covered and uncovered, wide and narrow, brightly striped and barely visible.

There are so many parking spaces that, for the most part, I take them for granted.

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But for some reason, that changes during the holiday season, doesn’t it?

The spaces don’t change, of course. They’re still doing what they do best: collecting oil droppings and cigarette butts.

But the perceived value of a parking space in December, as compared with the value of that same space in January, rises exponentially and sometimes catastrophically.

I’ve never understood exactly why that is, even as I confess to participating in the value-inflating process.

The rest of the year, I’m pretty indifferent about one parking space versus another, maybe because they seem so plentiful and welcoming in February and March. But for those few weeks in November and December, the value of a close-in parking space becomes almost unaffordable in te