Author: Will Michael Cousino

I would be lying if I said I didn’t have ABC Family’s “25 Days of Christmas” schedule screen-shotted on my phone, patiently waiting in my iPhoto for December 1st to come.

I like to think I’m pretty good at the act of Christmas shopping, buying the perfect gifts for those who deserve it.

Having worked retail before, I understand marketable time periods and points of higher sales.

I work at a Sunglass Hut in Polaris, and my job there also entails I work at our booth in the Macy’s Department store as well. As I am getting older, I feel like I go through a Cindy Loo Who type crisis around the holiday season.

I struggle through early December trying to get past the maiming’s on Black Friday and to remember why Christmas is important to me.

To say the least, I was not prepared for the day after October break when I returned to Macy’s to find it was a Winter Wonderland. As I rode down the escalator, I heard “Jingle Bell Rock” blasting on the loudspeaker. Concerned, I look around to see Twizzler-like banners hanging from the ceiling and big glass balls that say “Believe” with red writing covering the sales floor.

I turned to see where the purses used to be, which had been replaced by a faux Santa’s Workshop and two little girls were sitting already writing their letter’s to Santa in the North Pole.

When I got to my register, I was in a daze with specs of shiny white fake snow that covered the walls in my peripherals.

A note was left from my manager, saying, “Whoever can work from 5 p.m. Thanksgiving day through 10 p.m. (overnight) on Black Friday please contact me ASAP.”

My anxiety boiled up like marshmallow in hot chocolate and I felt I had been forced into this candy cane lane retail nightmare.

Department stores have taken Christmas shopping too far, this year being the tip of my iceberg. It was more unnerving than annoying that holiday commercials in October became more prominent in 2014.

Let’s not forget the fact that these stores will be open on Thanksgiving Day this year to boot, taking away from the true meaning of a holiday designed to bring family and friends together in thanks for what they already have. Thanksgiving should not be about what people neeed to buy.

I truly believe people need to take this issue seriously and as an issue reevaluate what the season really is for. We need to be thankful before we can be giving, because we need to understand how lucky we are to have what we have and whom we get to share it with.

I don’t appreciate snow in early October, just like I don’t appreciate being forced into the least important part of Christmas before I even pass the gravy.

This Halloween, instead of watching “Halloweentown” on Disney Channel with a stuffed ghost and hot tea, I’ve been researching with Delta Delta Delta’s faculty adviser, classics professor Lee Frantantuono, to unearth the mystery behind my missing sorority sister.

Ruth Baumgardner, 22, of Lakewood, Ohio, was last seen leaving her dormitory of Austin Hall on a spring finals week in the late 1930’s and went missing without a trace.

The mystery has never been solved, nor has it even come close to being solved, and is truly bone-chilling. An executive from the Travel Channel’s hit TV show “The Dead Files” recently contacted Megan Dill, Tri-Delta’s sorority president, searching for old photos of Baumgardner, assuming they were somewhere in our house, which was the first time any of us had ever heard about her story. In the attic we have hundreds of old composites and hers is most likely up there, covered in dust and left in the dark like her file at the police station has been for all these years.

While Frantantuono and I were searching for information, we found many old news articles, composites and, most importantly, the 1937 Ohio Wesleyan yearbook, titled “Le Bijou,” French for “The Jewel.’

So where did she go? Who took this young woman just as she was about to begin her future, or did she choose a different future of her own?

There are many different assumptions about what happened to Baumgardner. Some believe she was kidnapped, except her room was left in pristine condition. According to these accounts, the typically disorganized Baumgardener usually left her room disheveled.

Also complicating the issue of her kidnapping was that there was no evidence of foul play.

Other stories say she became too stressed and nervous before her tests and left with an unknown lover, leaving behind her beloved family and fiancée in her hometown.

Baumgardner was described to be wearing a brown sport suit, with a matching hat and brown suede gillie shoes that tied at the ankle. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, and an unusual light streak of hair on the left side of her head and a dimple on her chin.

This description was enough to freak me out, only because I also have a dimple on my chin and have an unusual dark streak of hair on my right side.

Her friends last saw her at 11 p.m. on May 4 with her hair in curlers and pins in her room in Austin Hall (now Austin Manor), room 319.

An article mentioned that she probably only had an old handbag and $5.00 in cash, and left behind her watch, sorority pin and loose change.

The investigators originally believed she suffered an amnesiac episode and wandered off.

To this day, no one knows what happened to her. Some claim they hear voices in Austin Manor of a female ghost. This Halloween, maybe if I go up to the third floor and call out “Ruthie,” I’ll find some answers or truth to the tale of the missing Tri-Delt.