The term “Black Friday” was coined in the 1960s to mark the kickoff to the Christmas shopping season. “Black” refers to stores moving from the “red” to the “black,” back when accounting records were kept by hand, and red ink indicated a loss, and black a profit. Ever since the start of the modern Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924, the Friday after Thanksgiving has been known as the unofficial start to the “buy fest” preceding Christmas.
I don’t want to sound like a Scrooge, but I will never…and I repeat NEVER… take a sleeping bag and camp out in front of a store to be first on line to shop on Black Friday, or any other day.
I especially don’t want to be first on line because of the poor soul who was trampled to death in a surge of frenetic materialism a few years ago. If I slept overnight on the pavement and the payoff was being stampeded to a pulp, my soul would never be at peace.
Leave it to our species to interpret the gift of consciousness to the world, Christ’s birth, as an opportunity to drag the concept into a materialistic framework. The combination of this and the Presidential debates may drive me over the edge.
Sigh… I don’t want to leave my readers with a bad taste, especially on Thanksgiving. Not that you have plenty to wipe the bad taste away, between turkey, trimmings and pumpkin pie. But I will be blogging with a steady drumbeat over these next weeks to make sure we don’t all get swept away in crazed celebration of…what?
Let’s put our credit cards away and have some peace. Let’s allow the quiet winter Sun to be heard…”It’s time to chill, be still.”
With love, Rosanne