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?