No Sweat

Right after Thanksgiving each year our church starts their 'Giving Trees' outreach program.  Several artificial trees are set out in the vestibule and hung with envelopes, each envelope representing one person's gift requests. Hubby Tony and I both select an envelope, buy the items on the list, then return the wrapped gifts for delivery. 

This year I chose a teenage girl, and Tony picked a 30-something man.   It wasn't until I got home and looked at the envelopes closely that I realized that the man said he wanted size 36 pants.  No length was given.

I think it's hard enough to guess at the tastes of someone you don't know without the extra wrinkle of having to guess their size, too.  I asked several people what they thought the average men's inseam was (the consensus was 32 or 33), then pondered their answers for a few days before I headed out.  At the first store I found the pair of jeans the girl wanted, and a nice pair of men's dress pants on the clearance rack. 

Because I didn't spend as much on the gentleman as I'd planned, I decided to buy him a second pair--basic sweat pants with elastic bottoms, which would avoid the length issue entirely.  However, those basic sweat pants ended up being surprisingly hard to find.  The first four stores I went to had upscale fleece or fancy polyester pants with open bottoms.  I finally broke down and went to Walmart, the bastion of basic. 

Even at Walmart it was difficult  I had to walk around the men's department a couple of times to find what I was looking for.  The first display I saw only had pants that were way too large, and the second had the right size, but only in a weird medium blue color.  (I grabbed them, just in case.)  On the third pass through I saw the wall of sweat shirts and pants and happily exchanged to strange-colored pants for a more traditional dark gray and called it done.