Thoughts on "Black Friday"

Black Friday is a modern happening, a term I never heard as a child or young adult and my personal feeling is that like so many developments in the last 30 years or so, it is another step in the wrong direction.

An employee killed in a "customer stampede" in a major store? A shooting in a Toys-R-Us store? This is progress?

I remember the "day after Thanksgiving" not as "Black Friday" when you went shopping, braving hordes of people all scrambling after the same item on the sales tables but as a day when you stayed home. There was still plenty of turkey and ham left over, plenty of dressing, cranberries, fruit salad and still a choice of pumpkin pie, mince pie or chocolate cake as well as a cookie jar full of ginger cookies I'd helped my Grandmother make and frost.

Because there weren't meals to cook, you got to skimp on some of the usual household chores and talk about getting the Christmas packages wrapped and sent out. Since nearly all of the gifts were handmade, they were mostly finished ... things from handquilted pillow tops to fruitcakes that had been sitting on the shelves in the pantry since fall. There would still be fudge and divinity and cookies to make for some gifts and the few "store bought" gifts were already ordered through the Sears, Roebuck or Montgomery Ward christmas catalogs.

There were very few store-bought gifts that I can recall from my childhood. Most of those, in fact, were books. With a former schoolteacher as a mother I was a reader at an early age and she encouraged books as gifts, I'm sure. The Will James books were favorites for many years and in fact I still have some of them on my bookshelves now and the Black Stallion books were probably the reason I have always been enamoured of Arabian horses and horseracing.

I can't help but think how long I've enjoyed some of these gifts ... I may not still have the actual book I received as a child, but some of those books are still on my personal bookshelves now some 50 years after I first read them ... and still enjoyed.

I can't help but wonder how many of the children who receive gifts that their parents have battled for through "Black Friday" to secure will remember those gifts with appreciation ... and still be enjoying the results of those gifts ... 50 years from now?

First time for everything

My first blog and my first post, with the feeling that this is one of those very slow learning curves I am beginning to really hate as a senior citizen. My first Internet experience came only 10 years ago, when I moved from very rural Montana to rural Kentucky. At the end of the first year, I had a professional farm website up for the horses, though it was designed and managed for me, as it still is.

I am not computer literate.I'm not even sure I want to be computer literate, though I have had to learn the basics, at least, to market the horses and ponies I have bred for the past 20 years. I am at least comfortable with email and in fact I now stay in touch with most of my acquaintences and friends with email rather than telephone ... but then I was never a telephone person either.

Being brought up on a remote Montana ranch where "modern conveniences" referred to having a pump on the back porch for running water and REA arrives only when you are in the 4th grade, you feel as if you are a generation behind most people.

The two years before my relocation to Kentucky, I again lived on a remote Montana ranch. In this case modern conveniences meant there was electricity. Period. Running water was a spring about 30 feet from the cabin. No indoor plumbing. Phone service was a cell phone in the pickup that operated at the top of the hill, a quarter mile drive.

I now have electricity, indoor plumbing, telephone service, television, Internet and computer but have to confess I found it easier in many ways going back to what I'd grown up with than in adjusting to "rural living" that seems to involve most of the elements of urban life.