Holiday shopping '09 begins with full parking lots, camp-outs and frazzled shoppers

Today marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season, but the scenes in parking lots and stores in the middle of the night was anything but Christmas-y.

At Seattle Premium Outlets in Tulalip, it was more like Disneyland, with barricades, brightly lit signs declaring "outlet lot full" and parking attendants turning away cars.

Colleen Campbell and her daughter, Tracy, drove from Surrey, B.C. without realizing that shops wouldn't be open most of the day. They caught a movie and visited Tulalip Resort Casino before being let into stores around 9:30 p.m., earlier than the outlet shops had planned to open.

Heading back to their car to unload three shopping bags from Guess and Aeropostale before returning to the fray, the Campbells said they planned to shop all night.

Colleen hopes they will head home before noon on Friday. "We're not sleeping," she said.

The sidewalk outside Best Buy in Everett was an urban campground. Inside about a dozen tents, people slept and tried to stay warm before the store's 5 a.m. opening.

Justin Murta of Everett staked out the first place in line on Wednesday morning, with a tent that fit several people, a 46-inch flat-screen television and a generator. He, his girlfriend and extended family had Thanksgiving dinner and played Guitar Hero to pass the time.

"What else are you going to do for Thanksgiving?" he asked.

It's Murta's fourth year of camping for the Big Shop. This time he's looking mostly for laptop computers marked down to $200.

A few tents back, Micah and Sarah Love (photo) held a position they claimed at 10 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day that they hope is close enough to the front to give them a shot at half off a desktop computer that's normally $1,000. The store promised to stock at least six, and their survey of the tents ahead of theirs indicated that they had a good shot at it.

The Loves took turns bringing things from home, including a Thanksgiving dinner that included roasted turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy and green bean casserole.

"My computer is six years old, so I need a new one and decided I might as well wait until today to torture myself for a good 19 hours," Micah Love said.

The wait was much shorter for Toys R Us shopper Melissa King of Lake Stevens, who arrived outside Toys R Us in Everett about 15 minutes before the store opened at midnight.

By that time, the line stretched past Michael's Arts & Crafts to a Top Food & Drug store on the far side of the parking lot.

But it moved quickly, and by 12:30 a.m. King had the prize: A $100 Fur Real Friends pony for her toddler daughter, something she said she never would have bought at the usual $300 price point.

"This is my first time shopping Black Friday," she said. "It's not really worth it."