Black Friday Again

It's the day after Thanksgiving, the aptly named "Black Friday", a the day when most shoppers dash to the first Christmas store and on line shopping sales of the newly arrived Christmas shopping season. My newspaper on the day before Black Friday (Thanksgiving Day) is so weighted by advertisement supplements from merchants that it is 10 times its normal weight. I guess even the news of the world takes a back seat to Black Friday sale ads in newspapers here. Too, it's sad when store ads take precedence of the news of the world.

I won't and never participate in the Black Friday shopping frenzy because the sales they hold on Black Friday will be repeated many times again, and with even bigger discounts, throughout the Christmas shopping season. Black Friday sales are really a mirage. Still most shoppers know it. They simply like the sport of waking up before day break and waiting in mall lines to buy what they could purchase later for the same or better price. There is not logic to it. But then, there is little logic to the overall madness of shopping anyway.

Maybe all those shopping fanatics go so they don't have to eat the leftover Thanksgiving turkey and mashed potatoes that sits in their refrigerators. Everybody wants to eat turkey on Thanksgiving but no one wants it the next day. I bet you can't find any turkey sold at the mall the day after Thanksgiving. Look at what they eat at the mall and you will see it is everything except turkey.

The horde of shoppers may also be at the mall the day after Thanksgiving in order to escape crazy Aunt Maude and Uncle Fred, who always seem to want to spend the night at their relatives house after having their Thanksgiving dinner there. If I had an Uncle Fred walking around the house in his pajamas with a broken zipper in front displaying his love muscle and jewels and an Aunt Maude who talked non stop about her lumpy breasts, I'd also want to go to the mall while they visited. Someone should tell the newspaper advertisers this so they would not waste money on ads that try to entice consumers to head for the mall. They will shop ads or not, just to escape their nutty relatives.

Another thing people do on Black Friday is to decorate their houses for Christmas. This process begins with hauling numerous boxes (often the wrong ones, since the identification labels are never correct) out of the attic to locate those fifty year old broken Reindeer displays and melted Christmas candles.

Usually, the decorations the homeowner wants and is searching for can't be found. Instead, what turns up is 12 sets of Christmas lights, all of which are broken. Yes, all this means that some of those shoppers are not only fleeing leftover turkey and insane relatives, but also escaping to the mall from Christmas decoration attic duty.

Black Friday is also the day a few non shoppers decide to buy or cut their Christmas tree. That's a great deal more fun than the mall or the attic or eating turkey again, but the problem is that beautiful, sweet smelling Christmas tree bought too early will likely turn brittle, browning and smelly before the end of the Christmas holidays. One cardinal rule of Christmas tree buying/cutting is to never get one before three weeks prior to Christmas. But then, if the homeowner has an artificial tree in the attic and can venture into the attic for just that tree and not the broken Christmas lights, he or she has found the best strategy of all. Remember though, having an artificial tree is like having an artificial leg. Everyone knows it is a phony one and thinks much less of it than a real one.

I hope that I have given you all the information you need about Black Friday. Now that you know it, and if confronted with Black Friday, I suggest you, lock yourself in your bedroom Thanksgiving night, take a powerful sleeping pill and wake up only in time for a normal Saturday.