The Turkey And The Shopping Cart

Before I get started with the main subject, I would like to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving; not only be thankful for what you have, but give thanks to the negative prospects of life on how they shaped you as a person. Be happy to be alive today.

     Thanksgiving has been a well cherished holiday in American history--has been. Throughout the years, the warming message behind such a holiday has changed into a simple meal, preparing the family for a battle of wits: Black-Friday. We all know what it is; we all know that it's a night, that one special night that only comes once a year, where like Halloween, we're given the opportunity to be something we're completely not--barbarians. Shopping carts become bulldozers, hands become talons, reaching for that limited-edition My Little Pony, and our vocabulary reduces to simple grunts, screeches, and profane words of someone's mother. What makes things worse is that Black-Friday is not only a whole day, but has become a part of Thanksgiving, literally assimilating its hours into a night known as Grey-Thursday.
     Black-Friday wasn't just about the shopping; Nancy Koehn states on Marketplace.org, "In the 1950s, some factory managers referred to the day after Thanksgiving as 'black Friday' because so many workers called in sick." She goes on, describing this imaginary sickness as a "bubonic plague," which took over the workplace's population. The police also were involved, as they had to deal with the massive crowds of shoppers: "watching a cop trying to deal with a group of jaywalkers" led to massive headaches (Koehn). Times moved on, and the goliath crowds only grew. The term Black-Friday, however, changed; merchants began to title the day after all the "black-ink" that showed up in their paperwork. The day has become, as Koehn titles it, a national holiday where retail finally comes out of the red-zone and into the black; instead of losing money, retail chains and other businesses began to make money at a fast pace. Black-Friday today is still seen as a holiday to some people, and as our years progress, we begin to see that Thanksgiving is reducing to nothing more than a simple day devoted to a cooked Big-bird.
     Being a part of society, I plan to go tonight to Target and Kohl's (I won't agree to saying "I am going to Grey-Thursday"). This year, no one in my family is interested in video-games or electronics, so I'll be fencing my way through the clothing departments with an unopened umbrella. Referring to tonight as Grey-Thursday stabs me in the heart; while I might have never had an actual, white-picket fence Thanksgiving--we eat our food where we want, and if we're thankful for something, we better darn well know it--it's a sad idea that a National Holiday, something that our country has grown with year after year, is reducing to nothing more than a large meal to fuel us through a shopping-bag massacre. Who knows, rather than get a week off for Thanksgiving, in a few years the days of vacation leading up to Black-Friday will be known as the calm before the storm.