BLACK FRIDAY
What happened to the
war on Christmas? Did we cut and run, didn't have the stomach for it? I am
actually quite pleased with the withdrawal of the Anti-Christmas crowd. I am
happy to see the word "Christmas" re-introduced to our holiday lexicon. The
separation may have been healthy, yielding a "freshness" to the phrase
"Merry Christmas". It's like a rebirth, a new relationship with traditional
Christmas greetings. However, there is still an enemy present amongst the
smoking debris of the bloody war on Christmas. It was present prior to the
official "war", and it is still present. Insidious, persistent and stealthy,
it continues to expand the stronghold on Christmas that it already has and
betrays not one clue about what it's ultimate mission is.
That enemy, big surprise, is the choking commercialism of Christmas. It's
funny; a friend remarked a week ago that Thanksgiving is what Christmas is
supposed to be. That kind of hung with me. The holidays share the central
theme of family. Thanksgiving in memory of the Pilgrim's settlement and
Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ. However, the days leading
up to Christmas have become stressful and unpleasant. We have left our
history of gathering with family and the modest sharing of gifts and entered
a new era of hyper-spending. Now, we're mixing violence with the spending,
reference the Playstation3 incident, which is an excellent combination, In
some ways, this makes the shopping experience more promising for me. No more
of this old-fashioned holding-the-door for women and the endless effort of
controlling my temper with inept salespeople and shoppers who walk too slow.
Embrace the new era by pushing and shoving your way to the electronics
department. The guy in front of you got the last DVD of "Desperate
Housewives/Season I"? Hey, that's nothing that flashing your .38 in the
parking lot won't fix.
Then there is the spending itself. For those of us with children and
extended families, Christmas turns into an expensive proposition. Children
expect to see packages coming out from under the tree and stretching across
the entire living room floor on Christmas morning. There is one moment my
wife and I share every year since we had children. Around midnight on
Christmas eve, after weeks of frenetic shopping, wrapping, returning and
second-guessing purchases, we stand back, look under the tree and ask..."Do
you think it's enough?" Every parents worst fear is that your children round
the corner to the Christmas tree room on that fateful morning, and break
into tears at the sight of one small package and a lump of coal. So we
overdo, and this sets the gold-standard for Christmases to come. A
never-ending cycle of competing with last Christmas. If only I had figured
this out earlier, I would have started with a Jelly Bean and a Hershey Kiss.
Instead, I set the bar too high and have now boxed myself into an unenviable
corner. I like to give, don't get me wrong...it's getting the stuff to give
that's a problem.
The last few years, I have noticed that the super-huge department stores
look like a war zone on the two or three days just prior to Christmas. The
aisles filled with half-opened boxes and broken pieces of this and that.
Haggard salespeople who are generally not pleasant or well-informed on a
good day, now look like the Night of the Living Dead. Eyes bloodshot, wisps
of dry white foam piled neatly at the corner of each lip, they have a look
that says..."don't even think about it.." As a consumer, I feel like the
town harlot on the morning after the prom. The party is over, the department
stores have had their way with us. What was in my pocket is now in theirs
and the relationship has been consummated.
And so "Black Friday" does not signify to me an accounting term, that the
stores will finally be "in the black", but instead is aptly named as the
beginning of the shopping/assault season. I brace myself again for spending
the next three months climbing out of debt from overspending. I try to
psyche myself for my inevitable visits to football-stadium sized stores,
check-out lines so long that the weather may actually be different up near
the register, and the stampeding hoards I will have to wrestle with to get
what I need to give. Knowing, as always, that it will all be worth it when
the day comes if the important things are in place. Family, friends and
happy children.