Black Thursday?

Thanksgiving is not far away now; two weeks from Thursday in fact. How many of us can already smell the turkey, the stuffing, the gravy and sweet potatoes, and...the sales?

Many stores have already announced that they simply cannot wait until the actual day after Thanksgiving, the aptly named Black Friday, to begin their Christmas sales. Many local stores, or, more precisely, the local outlets of national chains, have announced that they will open at midnight of Black Friday. We might suppose so that they can, with some smirky honesty, assert they have not encroached on the holiday. Still, some cannot wait that long. Great Lakes Crossing has said that their sale prices will go into effect at 9PM on Thanksgiving Day.

If we simply must appeal to secular attitudes, seeing as the secularists have pretty well made Christmas into a selfish orgy of shopping fanaticism anyway, is there at least some way we might make people believe again that it is all right to have a holiday or two not tied into our nation's economic success? Is not the human benefit in the way of rest and relaxation acceptable even to the nonreligious? Can we not have holidays be holidays anymore, simply so that we can see family and friends and just have a good time?

Anybody out seen Terry Gilliam's Brazil? How many of you who have actually get it? It's Christmas all the time in that movie world precisely so that the citizens will buy, buy, buy, because it's the only way they can keep the economy going. We're becoming like that, you know. Our lives are being run by how many things we have.

That's all we have at the end of the day, of course. Things. Our new TV is great for a few days, and then it's simply our TV. Same with our clothes and our cars and our almost everything else. Yet we rarely stop for a moment and consider that maybe, just maybe, we're being played.

This is not to say that shopping is bad or that buying and getting new things is bad. But it is to say that, when buying and getting becomes our focus, we might perhaps take a deep breath and a step back and ask how ourselves exactly how important mere things are. We need to tell ourselves: it's okay not to get the best TV at the best price. It's just a thing. It's okay if we help the general economy starting at 9AM on a Friday rather than let such insipid needs be fed while we're still on holiday. We'll be all right. We'll still have plenty of things at the end of the day.

Actually, we might have several more: the goodwill and good cheer of friends and the family. You know, the ethereal things which make for true humanity and true human happiness.