Izmailovo Market is inconvenient to get to and very cold on a winter afternoon.
With a spending limit of $150, I set myself an extra challenge - a time limit of one hour. As far as the gifts themselves went, only the "typically Russian" was off limits.So I hurried by stalls laden with "matryoshki" (Russian dolls which tidy away into each other) of Russian leaders, American baseball players or Marilyn Monroe.
Soviet army surplus belts, winter hats, holsters and so on, have become almost as "typical" since the Soviet Union tumbled and the army suffered an identity crisis.
No granny of mine was geting a patchwork potholder. My sister didn't need a wooden bowl decorated with black, red and gold flowers. My partner and father could live without desktop busts of Lenin, and my 7-year-old nephew wouldn't thank me for a pair of hairy woollen leggings.
I lingered over a "McLenin's" T-shirt emblazoned with the McDonald's logo and a head of Lenin, but mostly because the stallholders wanted to practice their American movie English on me.
I had already decided to jettison a Westerner's oversensitivity to bad taste, indifferent quality and environmental unconsciousness. What I thought was an engraved elephant tusk struck me as the ideal gift for a partner who has everything else.
The stallholder gallantly lifted the earflaps on his furry hat to tell me that it was, in fact, walrus, fashioned by Russian Eskimos in the late 1970s. I was very taken with the engraved scene of a seal slaughter on one side. The other was even more action-packed: a team of huskies seemed to have broken free from their sledge, sending roly-poly Eskimos flying all over the tusk.
But the price, $80 - the equivalent of six weeks' wages for the average Russian - seemed steep. I beat him down to $65 and popped the gorgeous gewgaw in the plastic bag that I, like any real Russian, remembered to take on my shopping expedition.
Across the way was a woman selling cobwebby hand-knitted shawls in various shades of gray. I thought of my grandmother, who appreciates natural wool and subtle colors, though I found it hard to imagine her hanging it over her bath with a hot shower turned on - recommended treatment for that extra fluffy effect. At $15 it seemed a bargain, but I did some token haggling and for $13 it was free to join the tusk.
A very old woman wearing a clanking necklace of can-openers decorated with Russian floral motifs deserved my patronage, not least because her wares were priced in rubles for a change. But could I afford to waste 1,000 rubles - $1?
Yes, because then I spotted a matching floral kettle costing $10. Given its badly soldered handle that seemed excessive, but I remembered my sister had just moved to a new house and I felt too excited to bother bargaining.
My bag was getting heavy and my uncovered head very cold, which gave me a good idea. If I bought my father a "typically Russian" furry hat, I could wear it until Christmas. Furthermore, it would replace the deluxe model hr had reluctantly lent me and which I had carelessly lost. The ones with tails, a la Davy Crockett, were particularly attractive and fashionable too, according to a Russian friend.
But no sooner had I fixed on a violently red fox fur with at least a foot of tail than the stallholder vanished. His friend at the stall next door said that he had gotten a tip that police were on the way.
Sure enough, two ruddy-faced boys swung by, in time with their truncheons. The stallholder's friend said his papers weren't in order, "but we are always getting into trouble. It's like America - we are the blacks."
Ah yes, like the dead fox I was already feeling very comfortable with, they were all from the northern Caucasus region bordering the Black Sea, whose myriad tribes enjoy an unrivaled reputation for criminality and blood feuding. Since October, Moscow's mayor has been busy flushing these people out of the city.
Back to business because my stallholder reappeared, smiling. He wanted $80 - way too much. Had I overspent on that junky tusk? Haggling helped. "Forty dollars," I said. "Sixty," he and his friends insisted, bringing pressure of numbers to bear. I gave in at $50.
"Ah, ah," they taunted me, "If you'd stuck at $40 and walked away, we'd have given it to you."
Cozy in my father's fox cloche, I found a moonlighting army major selling very glamorous black fur hats with extra long tails. An intellectual type peddling "natural rubber" Stalin and Hitler masks accosted me. I was tired of searching for some lead toy engine or lethal pop gun for my nephew. Eight dollars' worth of rubber Stalin with his odd purple pockmarks and crusty mustache would do well enough.
All done with 10 minutes to go. No Christmas crush since Russians don't go in for Christmas much, and anyway Orthodox Christmas is Jan. 7.
I had spent a total of $150 - and all but one dollar's worth illegally. Russians are forbidden to trade in anything but rubles without a special license.