The magic of Black Friday gets scrutinized…

Good evening, Netizens… We have until this Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, and there is little more needs to be said than the macabre and often delusional pre-Christmas Shopping Day known as “Black Friday” has already begun a bit earlier than usual and it appears to be lasting several weeks. According to my liege, Jeanie of Spokane, we have only 32 more days before Christmas. To put it more succinctly, merchants and big box stores alike are desperate to steer us all into their stores before then so we’ll be sure to participate in the combination riot, donnybrook, insurrection and various other orgiastically unworthy descriptions of Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. That was, we get to shop twice as much as if we had waited until just before Christmas to do our shopping, and we still have those nefarious crowds, some who do not bathe often enough and others who trample whoever is ahead of them in line. Maybe , just maybe if we have a little spare time between now and then, we might actually have some disposable time to remember ourselves and possibly what Christmas is supposed to represent. I went into a pique several years ago when transfixed shoppers back east had what many termed a civil riot over a limited number of Elmo dolls. People were injured, taken to hospitals, while others were arrested for being disorderly. Or how about this YouTube video telling about Cabbage Patch dolls. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is-e1FX8-D4 or this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4vmyUb6aTU&NR=1&feature=fvwp Now let’s wildly speculate for a moment here. How many of either the Cabbage Patch or Tickle Me Elmo dolls are already in the bottom of the nearest solid waste landfill? Anyone care to speculate? This year we are suffering beneath a fractured economy, with more people unemployed than purportedly anytime since the 80’s. More families are planning to get a free turkey for Thanksgiving Day from KREM-2’s Tom’s Turkey Drive than ever before in the history of this strange sociological event. Yet the advertisers are saying there is already excitement in the air. Excitement? I submit that what they term to be excitement isn’t that at all. At least among those who remember Thanksgiving Day when it was 100% a family event, and Christmas when it still had some elements of the Birth of Christ attached, I would say rather than excitement, this is much more like sadness. Of course, your results may differ. Dave