CNN.com is reporting today that a full 41 million Americans have not even begun their Christmas shopping. The biggest procrastinators? Surprise, surprise -- men, and those in the 35- to 44-year-old age range. In this group, 21 percent said they had not started spending their holiday cash.

I'm in the age range of those who haven't even started shopping yet, but I can't say I'm in the same boat as those folks. Unusually for me, I'm just about done. Typically by this time of year I have stressed myself out by waiting to buy some gift that is just about impossible to get just days before Christmas. That didn't happen to me this year for some reason, so all is well in my pre-Christmas state of mind.

Last year people were driving all over in search of the elusive Wii gaming system, but I know a few families who will have one under their tree this year without much stress and struggle.

So what are the hard-to-find gifts this Christmas?

Our very own MilwaukeeMoms.com blogger Marianne Szymanski will offer new toy ideas for parents all this month!

Marianne's first video segment deals with board games, and she has great ideas for all ages. 

Look for the Toy Tips box on the home page of MilwaukeeMoms.com for a new video clip each week from now through Christmas. Watch before you shop!

Here's a link to the first video in her series. 

I'm no economic scholar, so I'm not even going to try to talk about what's going on in the financial markets and with the big boys in the worlds of investing, mortgages and insurance.

What I do know -- what we all know -- is that what we pay at the pump, the grocery store and the checks we write out to our utility companies are all going through the roof, in increments of 10 cents here, a quarter more there. (Or $84 per month more on my We Energies bill. Whatever.)

It seems like every time I go to the store lately, the prices on the basic grocery items I always buy are inching up on me. It's just small enough that if you don't really look at the label on the shelf and think about what you paid last time, you might not even notice it. When it's all added up at the register, you notice, but you don't necessarily see that couple of cents on each individual item.

Just for fun (sick fun, I admit), I decided to track one item on my grocery bill. Just one. There's a certain kind of granola I like to buy, mix it into some vanilla yogurt and eat it every morning for breakfast. (My husband says this mixture looks like a bowl of bird poop, but I digress.)

Anyway, a bag of the granola is 12 ounces.

In July, it was $4.79 per bag.

By August, it had increased to $5.09.

Today, it's $5.25. 

In two months, it's up nearly 50 cents. 

That's just for that one item -- one of 30 that I bought on my shopping trip this week. In fairness, I didn't track the others to see how much they've risen in two months, but I would imagine that most, if not all, have increased by some percentage in the past six months. 

This price creep has me thinking: How soon until I consider my granola a luxury item? When it hits $5.50 per bag? $6? What about when the staples hit these kinds of number? Milk's close to $4 per gallon. What will happen when it hits $5? It's near that in some parts of the country.

While everyone else is worrying about the big powerhouse financial giants, we're worrying about those of us who are not. Think there's going to come a time when they worry about us?

I had to go to the bank last night after traditional banking hours, so I went to a branch office inside a grocery store in a nearby community.

While I was there, I decided to pick up a few things. I went to the self-checkout area and there was a woman standing back from all of the checkout stations, waiting for one to open up. I lined up behind her.

Here's where it got uncomfortable. A young couple with a baby in a stroller walked up next to me. When I say "young," I mean it. They looked like they were about 17 or 18 at the most.

They stood beside me for a moment, then moved directly behind one of the stations where a woman was checking out. In other words, they bypassed the line the woman in front of me had started.

The woman in front of me turned to me with a look of outrage on her face. "I'm going to say something," she said.

"Hey, we're waiting here. There's a line. Get in the line," she shouted to the young couple.

(Confession: I hate this kind of thing. I'm definitely the kind who will just let someone go in this type of situation. If they're in that much of a hurry, whatever. It won't kill me.)

The boy turned to her and said, "I see your line. This is my line. I don't have to wait in your line."

Needless to say, it degenerated pretty fast with the woman in front of me calling this kid on his rudeness, and him shouting back at her. It stopped just short of obscenities (well, he might have thrown out one at her) but it was heated.

As it all turned out, the woman in front of me and I both checked out before the pair because the station they picked had a woman there who didn't know how to operate the payment system, so it took her forever.

The whole thing was ugly, largely because of the loud yelling back and forth between the woman and the young couple, but it does raise an issue. What is the protocol for waiting for the self-checkout stations? Form one line or everyone on their own?

What do you do when you think someone is violating the unwritten etiquette? Are you one to speak up or one who would pretend she forgot something and scoot off to another part of the store? A friend of mine said that's what she would have done.

Other options?