Oh, Christmas! How I have missed
your multicolored light glow. I remember as a kid being excited for Christmas
about the time December rolled around. Stores would be closed on Thanksgiving,
families would gather to spend time with each other, just all around good cheer
and festivities. In those 15 – 20 years since those times; stores are now open
on Thanksgiving Day to get people prepped for the “Christmas Deals”, families
now go shopping together from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, and the basic
cheer and merriment has given way to punching the face of the person that
grabbed the last dancing Elmo doll at the same time you did because you
promised your little prince or princess that you’ll get them one and heaven
forbid if you need to come back to the store in the month of December to get
one when the new shipment comes in. Are we really this stupid and materialistic
that we see the time between Halloween and Christmas as one gigantic shopping
super-month? I submit my answer as yes.
Welcome To Hallow-giving-mas-tember!
We have no
Thanksgiving anymore, hell, we don’t even have November anymore! For whatever
reason, we as a capitalist society have decided that once the clock strikes
midnight on Old Hallows Eve, it’s Christmas! Thanksgiving is just a day where
you suffer through a wonderful home cooked meal that your parents began working
on at three in the morning so the turkey would finish on time when the rest of
your family arrives at their house to stuff their faces full of amazing food,
and then leave at five to get to Wal-Mart by six so they don’t miss the deal.
Just walk
through a Target, Wal-Mart, any mall (out-door or in-door), Macy’s, or any
store that sells stuff the day after Halloween and you will see Christmas shit
everywhere! There is no mention of Thanksgiving. No Thanksgiving turkey
give-away, no sweet potato price cut, no pilgrim decorations, NOTHING! Because
of this odd change in our perception of holiday order, I have dubbed the seven
weeks between Halloween and Christmas as Hallow-giving-mas-tember! It’s an
entirely new month devoted to shopping!
I just cut
out all the garbage that no one wanted anyways. In fact, why are we waiting for
Thanksgiving to have all the deals start? We need to get going earlier! Tell
you what, the day after Halloween should be known as Orange Alert Day! It’s the
new “Black Friday”! The stores will all be open at midnight, and everyone will
be all hopped up on sugar from the candy they got trick-or-treating (or the
candy their kids got, or the candy they just bought because they weren’t
invited to the Halloween party that everyone was talking about at work and so
they went through an entire bag of 50 fun sized Snickers in two hours! THANKS
BRET!) and they can all stand in line to buy a 50” LCD TV that is $100 bucks
off the regular price but they really don’t need because they have two 48” LCD
TVs already but they got two inches of extra space to hang the new one in the
alcove above the fireplace so they GOTTA HAVE IT!
Everyone will be so happy and
joyful as they crash from their sugar rush earlier in the evening. I can
guarantee you your local Best Buy will turn into some form of Hunger Games
within an hour. We would weep for losing Uncle Dave, but would cheer on his
memory as we watched the NFL on our new TV during Christmas! “We love you Uncle
Dave, but you needed to be faster to avoid the rush to the checkout line. He
was a good man. And my GOD! The resolution on this damn thing is amazing! I can
see Peyton Manning’s nose hair! It was a noble sacrifice, thanks Uncle Dave!”
That would
be the new month of Hallow-giving-mas-tember, and everyone would be happy.
Except Uncle Dave. He would be dead.
Family Sucks
Some of my
best memories with my immediate and extended family come from Thanksgiving. We
never went shopping or talked about gifts. We didn’t care what sales were going
to happen or what store would open at what time. We got together, ate amazing
food, talked (not texting or face-timing or emailing), and played awesome party
games. You know, the ones that come in a box, with a game board and cards, and
shere you actually interact with people…real people…in the same room…face to
face. This is the Thanksgiving that companies like Wal-Mart and Target have
destroyed.
In the eyes
of our “job creators”, families suck. They suck profits right out of their
pockets. And we certainly can’t have that happening here in the U.S. of A.
Family is not American. Shopping is American! Going to work at noon so you can
stock shelves and get ready for the rush of crazy shopping zombies is much more
important than seeing your mother and father who you only call once every three
weeks because you are low on cash and need to pay the rent. Yeah, way more
important to get the new Dancing Diaper Elmo up on the shelves because
now it’s $15.00 and it was originally $30.00, and there are going to be pissed
off parents if Bradley isn’t in there making sure that the shipment is
organized on that end cap. College kids need to get their priorities straight.
Here’s a
hint. Go see your family, even if you are scheduled to work on “Black
Thursday/Friday” (Tell your employer to go screw themselves. Unless, of course,
it’s your only job and you will lose it if you don’t show up. In that case,
bend over and take it, but do a really shitty job on that day, or work really
slowly, that’s what I did as my own way to stick it to the man for making me
work when I should be with my family. I like my turkey). Talk to them.
Reconnect. Share a laugh or a cry or something over turkey and gravy. Reminisce
about stories from 10, 15, and 20 years ago that you though your parents forgot
about, or never knew about to begin with and you want to see the look on their
faces when they find out that you were not as perfect a child as you led them
to believe, and just remember being together for Thanksgiving. Black Friday is
the worst thing we as a society have ever allowed to happen. But it’s here and
we have to deal with it, but that doesn’t mean we have to roll over and take
it. Enjoy your family, not standing in lines waiting to buy a crappy Blu-ray
player that will die on you in a year. Save your money, shopping sucks.
Our Stupidity Makes This Happen
The only
reason the whole “Shopping for two months” thing even happens is because we as
a society are dumb enough to buy into the concept. Once we all got a taste of
this, the companies that sell us stuff saw a golden opportunity, turned it into
a way bigger deal than it should ever have been, and laughed all the way to the
bank as we fought each other, stood in line for hours both to get into the
store and to check out, and gobbled up any and all deals that we have deemed
awesome enough to go after.
The impact
of this is striking. Robots do not run stores. There are people that are forced
to get to work on Thanksgiving Day and get ready for all of the stupid
consumers to go in and buy stupid shit they don’t need that will be on sale for
the next month. What we have created is a Thanksgiving Day that is forcing
people to go to work rather than be with loved ones. It’s a day people are
starting to hate now because it was once a day everyone got off to enjoy a meal
somewhere with people they know and love; now it’s a day where you get to deal
with angry butt-holes who, because they can’t read above a 6th grade
level, cannot understand why the computer they want isn’t on sale for as much
as they thought and argue about it for a good half hour. Happened to me twice
on the same day when I was working at five in the morning on “Black Friday”.
Never. Again.
The simple
solution is to just not go shopping on Thanksgiving Day, or on the “Black
Friday” after Thanksgiving. We as a country have the power to stop this. But I
feel that we are doomed because we can’t ignore the fact that the deals are so
good because the stores do a very good job at promoting all their stuff. It’s
like all the companies of the U.S. hired Don King to take over advertising for
a whole month, and all of us are suckers for a good sales pitch, no matter how
shitty the products (You younger people may not know who Don King is, but he
could sell a fight between a snail and a caterpillar and make it seem like
Armageddon was coming to an arena near you and you would buy tickets to it as
soon as he uttered the words. I miss those days.).
I have also just found out that the
“Black Friday” sales stuff is going international; companies are using what
they have learned here in the U.S. and are applying it to England, France,
Germany and most of Europe to boost sales (profits) during the Holiday Season,
in which none of those countries celebrates Thanksgiving and their Holiday
Season used to consist of Christmas. But not anymore! U.S. companies fixed that
right up and let the rest of the developed world understand the joys of
extending Christmas out for as long as possible. If the world were able to
facepalm itself, this would be the time to do it.
So we are
simply stuck with what we have. We are forced to swallow almost two whole
months of Christmas, Thanksgiving is slowly swirling down the toilet, and
Christmas itself is all about how much new shit you can accumulate rather than
enjoying the company around you and reflecting on another year with the people
you love. We have no hope to recover from this tragedy of
Hallow-giving-mas-tember, but we can win the small battles with our own
families. I ask all of you to enjoy what you have in your life and know that
what you are able to buy on sale is not as important as the time you spend with
the people that you love. TVs go on sale all year; you can never buy more time.
Go eat some turkey.
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