WITH THE holiday season looming, I feel as though now is as good a time as any to address one of the black marks that spoils Thanksgiving break. Old-time movies depict this holiday as an Americana rally around fowl and football, but these days this holiday is fast becoming a stepping stone, a marketing tool of dubious significance in the mad rush toward Christmas. Before you label me a cynic, take a look at your Thanksgiving break plans. It is almost impossible to find a person ready to settle, comatose on a couch, for the duration of the break; Thanksgiving weekend has become a time of going and doing, rather than a last rest before the onslaught of December. The holiday has become just another five-day break, shoehorned between Halloween and Christmas in the no-man's land of the calendar that is November. Reverence must be restored to Thanksgiving, and the Black Friday leech that has affixed itself to the holiday must be burned off with the flame of laziness and tradition.
Shopping is to the Thanksgiving spirit what Yoko was to the Beatles. The destructive force that is the early-bird sale has invaded the homes and minds of nearly every American family. Thanksgiving is a time of gross overeating and general sloth in front of a television, but some retail-minded genius has managed to elevate that fateful following Friday to its own holiday status. Instead of "the day after Thanksgiving," we call it Black Friday.
Black Friday is fast-paced, hectic and cutthroat; it stands for everything Thanksgiving does not. After the meal, in that lull of conversation and intellectual ability that should be occupied by mindless football viewership, the storm of the upcoming spending-spree wells up. Retail-charged gossip is bandied about as the one-day only opportunities that await the holiday bargain-hunters begin to overshadow the holiday for which they exist. Thanksgiving is becoming the day before a blow-out sale, rather than the traditional meander toward indigestion and family relationship it was meant to be.
In addition to the sudden injection of frenzy into a holiday historically renowned for its warmth and peacefulness, this fearfully named "event" holds hidden anxiety, even for people who do not participate in the spending circus. Christmas shopping begins early that morning, and after being inundated for weeks by frustrating circulars advertising the imminent sale on generally worthless merchandise, the average American tensely awaits the report on Black Friday's success. That's right, after buying a power-blender set at Sears for 20 percent off, you get to return home and find out that the economic climate for the Christmas season is not nearly as promising as the experts from CNN hoped. Christmas is still a month away and already a bust, all thanks to shopping's stranglehold on Thanksgiving.
The whole situation has gotten out of hand. I appreciate the free market as much as the next fellow, and by no means is this meant to be a commentary on retail gluttony. The holiday is being overrun, though, and it is not all that hard to imagine a future in which Thanksgiving has fallen to the same bastardized holiday status as President's Day. It is a real possibility. Even now, there is an entire Web site dedicated to keeping the shopping elite abreast of the latest developments and gossip on the day's various deals and sales. "BFads.net aims to serve one purpose," asserts the Web site's self-description, and that is "to help better your Black Friday experience." The site itself is rife with enough sensation to make Larry Flint blush, but the holiday for which the sales are planned receives no acknowledgment amongst huge headlines about flat-screen TVs and Costco jewelry liquidations.
If the Macy's Day Parade is going to avoid obscurity as shoppers focus on parading their way to Macy's the next day, the growing association between Thanksgiving and super sales must be severed. Postpone the event, if just for a day; Saturday sales would allow for at least a day's separation between the traditional holiday and the retail carnival, allowing people a bit more time to digest and digress with family and friends before the mad rush on, to both the stores and to Christmas a month later.
Stores should recognize the disservice their sales are doing to the traditional lethargy of Thanksgiving. If not, the states should step in, and throw a blue law on Black Friday, barring stores from opening to remove the possibility for sales. Either way, the amiable pace at which Thanksgiving has always played out is under attack, and it will be a sad day when the holiday weekend becomes just another chance to get good deals on treadmills and Corollas. Prohibiting sales on the Friday after the holiday would halt this retail charge, and restore to the weekend the attitude of apathy for which it has always been loved.
Dave Infante's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at dinfante@cavalierdaily.com.
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