I hope the snow is falling gently on this Friday after Thanksgiving, creating a winter wonderland. Following years of tradition, I will be in downtown Grand Marais, puttering about. I’ll shop a little, buy a mocha coffee at the local coffee shop and chat with many friends and neighbors. When I drive home, in the early sunset, it will be to a feast of turkey leftovers.
I’ve always thought of the day after Thanksgiving as special, the first day of the Christmas season filled with the joy of looking for gifts and socializing with other community members, and I’m thinking a lot of people agree with me. So I feel justified in having a bone to pick with the media.
The media calls this day Black Friday, giving it an increasingly negative meaning. The original term meant that businesses hopefully would make enough money to become debt free, and that was well and good. But somewhere along the line, things got out of whack.
We all know the story. Stores offered good deals. People lined up to get them. Soon stores were opening at midnight and people were mobbing each other to get in the doors. Some businesses began opening on Thanksgiving, forcing people to work on a day once regarded as a national holiday. That brings us up to 2013 where—pardon me if I seem overly dramatic— the whole holiday weekend has become an unattractive tangle of greed and selfishness.
I am sick and tired of hearing this nonsense and have the feeling I’m not alone. Can you tolerate one more Walmart scene of a mob looking murderous over a flat-screen TV? I can’t.
I suggest that we wipe the slate and start over. Wash the day after Thanksgiving clean, hang it out to dry and give it a new name. Call it Silver Friday (if you’re inclined to think in monetary terms) or Silver Lining Friday (if you like to think positive) or anything but the negative thing it’s become.
Like many of us, I have a special attachment for the day after Thanksgiving—as it originally was. Over the years, I’ve spent this day with loved ones beginning with my mother and favorite two aunts in downtown Minneapolis and in Grand Marais with my daughter and college friends she brought home and an assortment of other visiting family members.
Our pattern was the same. A little bit of shopping, a lot of laughing and talking and lunch at a local restaurant. Even though I will be alone this year, my loved ones will be there in spirit.
It’s always a pleasure to burn off some of the previous day’s mashed potatoes and gravy by heading for town and strolling around visiting the local stores. Yes, it’s still consumerism, but a kinder, gentler consumerism than the media portrays. The local businesses offer sale prices, but people don’t trample others just to be first in line.
Silver Lining Friday… it does have a certain ring.
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