Have you been to a mall lately? It's sort of a depressing place. Lots of stores have vacated the premises, and with the clerks that are left manning the surviving shops and kiosks look like they're starved for social interaction. There's just no one there. The Christmas music playing over the PA seems out of place in such a deserted venue.

The real shopping crowds this holiday season aren't at the mall -- no one's paying full price this for anything anymore. But you will find long lines at your local thrift stores, where you can purchase new and gently used clothes, furniture, accessories, and more for just a few bucks a pop, whether you're buying Levi's or designer jeans with the tags still on them.

Thrift stores are a great place to find inexpensive treasures, especially when "vintage" is so totally in style. Don't make the rookie mistake of thinking of thrift shopping as going through other people's trash. Lots of things for sale there have never been worn before at all, and everything has to be in decent condition before they put it on their racks, even at Goodwill. Tons of the things you'll find there are actually straight from the mall -- when stores can't sell all their merchandise, they send it to thrift stores to make room on their own clearance racks. These items might be a season or two behind the actual weather, but they're brand new, and the seasons will roll around again next year.

Secondhand shops are an especially great place for women to look for formal wear. So often, a girl will spend hundreds of dollars on a prom dress that she only wears once -- then it finds its way to the Goodwill racks after only a few hours of wear, and now it can be yours for less than $10. Avoiding the mall also means you're less likely to show up at your next formal wearing the same dress as everyone else who shops at JC Penney. (My local mall isn't very big, so my high school prom had 200 girls all wearing the same 10 dresses.)

As a girl, I was a perfectionist. I can remember my boxes of watercolors, and how I obsessively rinsed my brushes between colors so as not to turn them into a rainbow of blacks and browns. Pastels were even more precious, and took a soft touch to blend them on paper, but not on the instrument itself. It's hard to create when you're spending your energy focused on keeping things neat and orderly.

And then I had kids.

The first time I let my two-year-old destroy a perfectly good watercolor box in a happy hour, I took lots of deep yoga breaths and then faced facts: I was not about to run back to the art supply store after every messy creation to get a new box. Painting in the black and brown spectrum didn't faze him at all. Why fight the power of a preschooler's exuberance?

So during my next trip to the Goodwill Bins, the outlet where everything is sold by the pound, I "picked" until I found some treasures. A very good quality, but heavily used, watercolor set, missing its brush. A treasure trove of fancy pastels, half of them dumped out of their box. In five minutes, I'd gathered up all the broken and chalky bits and ended up paying less than a dollar for my artistic treasure.

It turns out that the art supplies are now partially destroyed, and I often end up discovering a brilliantly-colored pastel chunk underfoot (note to mothers out there: don't clean up pastels with vinegar. It's like dying your floor). But I don't sweat: I rescued those supplies from the trash, so I can let go of my obsessive-compulsive self and just let the little boys be. Thrifting art supplies for little ones is the way to go.

This post was written as part of a series on how to thrift shop smarter. Read more on what to buy, and not to buy, at thrift stores.

Part of the problem inherent in cookbook shopping is that it's really hard to take it for a dry run, first. You can get a feel for a pattern book by the photos of the finished object; for fiction, you can read a few pages and see if it draws you in. But you don't cook for how a meal looks, and all the brilliant prose in the world won't save a badly composed set of instructions for a loaf of bread.

But where there's a thrift shop, there's a way. When I page through cookbooks in the bookshelves of a vintage boutique, I'm not looking for favorite subjects or shiniest images. No, I'm looking for the most used book of all; the one with pages splattered with olive oil and flour and tomato sauce. The one whose recipes were followed, and then followed again.

Paying $15 or $20 for a glossy cookbook full of lovingly-composed food photos is great, if you like to experience the way food looks. Celebrity chef cookbooks? Again, you're paying to look at something, and this time it's Bobby Flay or Giada Laurentis; surely attractive folks, I'll give you that, but a cute boy just gets in the way of good food unless he's waiting in the breakfast nook. Cooking from an experienced cookbook is the next best thing to learning from an experienced chef; someone else has already done the trial and error for you. And at 50 cents to a few dollars, you can't beat the price of thrift store cookbooks. All the better to save for the ingredients!

This post was written as part of a series on how to thrift shop smarter. Read more on what to buy, and not to buy, at thrift stores.

If you enjoy a hot beverage once in a while, you've probably felt it: the conviction that a lovely mug would make you happy. Do you know the domestic bliss encapsulated in that tableau; a clean surface, a project you enjoy, a mug that signifies your style? It's the still-life art as life.

But there's a dark side to this scene of homely perfection. Mugs break. And if you're clumsy like me -- or if you have a houseful of roughhousing children, like me -- it's a good bet that your tableaux are often shattered (figuratively, literally, noisily) by an errant elbow, an exuberantly tossed pillow, a swift brotherly punch. (I'm trying to break the boys of their fighting but, troublingly, they're boys.)

It's why buying mugs from thrift stores, is the better way to go. Never troubled by a chipped or crackled mug, I delight in discovering the lonesome pottery or ceramic that might make my coffee table complete. I pay a dollar, or less, per interesting colorful vessel and it brightens my life, until it breaks, without depressing my wallet. I don't have to commit to just one look, either; I can choose the speckly one with coffee, the green one with tea, the snow-flake-covered one with hot chocolate. Thrifting mugs? It's a win-win.

This post was written as part of a series on how to thrift shop smarter. Read more on what to buy, and not to buy, at thrift stores.

There does seem to be something sleazy about the idea of buying someone a "thrift gift." How cheap can you be? Here's a different spin and all it takes is a bit of thought and creativity.

Like any kind of gift buying, gift shopping at thrift stores is easier and more fun for people you know well. This is particularly true for people who have passions of their own - the friend who loves sailing, dogs, cooking or art, for example - is the person to have at the back of your mind as you travel the thrift shop circuit. There are also occasions that readily lend themselves to thrifty gift shopping.

Here are a smattering of ideas:

• If you are visiting a friend in the hospital, you don't need to drop $20 at the hospital gift shop. You can find a great vase for $1 or less and fill it with twice as many beautiful flowers for half the price you'll otherwise pay.
• Look for small covered boxes. You can frequently find nice ones for $1 or $2. Add a piece of jewelry and give it to your favorite teenager.
• Buy a pretty basket - watch especially for the ones designed to hold letters. Decorate it with ribbon, fill it with stationary and add a nice pen.
• For a friend starting a new job or opening an office: art, a dictionary, thesaurus or desk encyclopedia, a covered glass candy jar (which you'll sanitize in the dishwasher and fill).
• For the new mother: books on babies and children. These can often be picked up mint - either because the mother already had it, received three copies, or didn't have time to read.

Come back tomorrow for five more thrifty gift ideas!

For years, the only way sweaters made it into my wardrobe was because some woman -- sister, wife, Mom -- put them there. At $75 and up, sweaters never seemed a justifiable expense -- I was living in the South, the only cold I really dealt with were walks to the car in January, which I managed just fine in a coat and short sleeves.

Then I discovered the Goodwill -- where the sweaters were FOUR BUCKS. Four dollars for a sweater? Suddenly I couldn't own enough sweaters. I'd drive forth and back among the area's thrift shops, flipping through sweater racks for thirty minutes, hunting for that jackpot combination of size and fashion (I'm not that fashionable, but I know what I wouldn't wear). I'd run home with my woolen loot, throw 'em in the dryer with some Dryel or Dry Cleaner's Secret, and I'd be good to go.

So let's go sweater hunting! Some tips:

Size. This is rudimentary stuff -- don't just hold it up to your chest, try it on. Check the waist length, see if the sweater can comfortably accommodate whatever inner layers you'll be wearing, make sure the arms are roomy enough to let you move freely but not so long that you can't find your hands.

Of my many stupid habits, few are more ill-advised than hoarding record albums. If you're considering the hobby -- maybe you dig on old music, perhaps today's bands just aren't cutting it for you -- forget it. The ends do not justify the means.

Sure, you can snag a thrift shop record for the cost of a single iTunes download, maybe your more charitable friends will be mildly charmed by your quirky collection. See if you can get those friends to help you schlep ten or twenty crates of those weighty nightmares when moving day rolls around.

Alas, if you do take up this ridiculous pastime, don't bother hitting thrift stores, it's just a waste of time and handsoap. For return on investment, there are few activities less rewarding than digging around on your hands and knees through bins of dirty, flaking, moldy, decaying record albums, dreaming that you're gonna come up with anything that will redeem the cardboard flecks covering your good coat, the dust assault on your sinuses, the mysterious hair that gets in your mouth, the spiders and their webs.

Julie Tilsner had a great list of five golden rules to thrift store shopping. Let's make it ten:

6). The early bird gets the worm. Every thrift store has its own schedule. In our Upper Cape area, Mashpee Senior Center's shop opens for the week on Monday, St. Vincent de Paul opens on Tuesday, Emerald House on Wednesday, North Falmouth Congregational Church on Thursday. While new items are added throughout the week, you'll find the most new additions on opening morning, often at the ends of the rack. The best time to be there is the beginning of their week.

7). Examine the labels: A crisp label often means little or no wear/washing.