Tis The Season?!

4:59:54, :55, :56, :57, :58, :59…..5:00 am!! The Wal-Mart sales associates tear off the black cling wrap and all hell breaks loose. Imagine, if you weren’t there (and some of you probably were), grown men and women pushing and shoving each other to grab handfuls of anything from $2 DVDs to a $299 Nintendo Wii, Digital photo frames and 4gb flash drives. There was yelling and screaming and I swear I saw a sales associate get swallowed by a sea of angry women fighting over $4 children’s sweat suits. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn there were free crack rocks at the bottom of the product displays. This was my first Black Friday (why do we capitalize it like it is an official nationally observed holiday) experience so I was somewhat mesmerized by the insanity that was playing out. Then I remembered that we were there with a list and on a mission and it wasn’t to be a spectator in this fight for parent of the year. So I took a deep breath, made sure I had good traction with my shoes, told Corey to cover me and I went in. I could see the pile of Hanna Montana guitar/action figure combos dwindling by the millisecond. There was no time for timidity. I dove in and got what I went for, along with some things I didn’t want; namely an elbow to the ribcage, a smashed foot and a glare that would burn a hole through double pane glass from a lady who didn’t even want one of those stupid Hanna Montana guitar/action figure combos! It was absolutely nuts. I’m sure most of you heard about the Wal-Mart associate in New York who was trampled to death from, quote “out-of-control” shoppers (Talk about your all time understatements). What was the most disheartening about the whole scenario was that one of the shoppers was belligerent and furious and refused to leave when the store announced it was closing because of the death. She must have been that woman by the Hanna Montana guitars’ cousin.

Don’t ask why I went. It’s irrelevant. It really doesn’t matter. Really. OKAY!! I’ll tell you. Why else would I get up at 3 in the morning to be at Kohl’s by 4, Wal-Mart by 5, Home Depot by 6 and Target immediately following? Just to get a list of gifts so we could save $250 and lose valuable sleep that takes 4 days to recover from? Why? You know why! So at 6:30 on Christmas morning our children can run down the stairs with sleepy in their eyes and giddiness in their hearts. So they can turn the corner and experience pure unadulterated joy because some arthritic fat guy in a red suit landed 8 reindeer on our roof, somehow fit down our narrow soot covered chimney without setting off the alarm, ate all the rice krispie treats and drank the room temperature milk, managed to not make a sound while he left presents under the tree and left in the blink of an eye. I can just see it now. They will be so excited they won’t be able to see straight. They won’t be able to stop talking about what “Santa” brought them. They will want to rip into every one of their toys and play with them like it is the last toy on earth. They’ll run to their stockings and dump them out on the floor and rummage through the candy and rinky-dink toys “Santa” thought they just HAD to have. Then at approximately 6:37 it will all be over and we will be sitting around looking at each other wondering what the crap we do for the next 5 hours until we go to the grandparent’s house and do it all over again! All this hype and build up for about 7 minutes of insanity. I don’t know about you, but I CANNOT wait!

So that’s why I was up at 3 in the morning the Friday after Thanksgiving doing my part to put retailers back on the black side of the bottom line. Overall it wasn’t that bad. Corey and I kept a pretty good attitude and had I not been with my wife, I wouldn’t have had nearly as good a time. However, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to any of you. If you can afford to buy your gifts either before or after Black Friday, do it. If you can’t, make a list, map out your plan of attack, stick to your list and attack strategy and invest in an athletic support cup (for the male readers, obviously). And if a stocky lady with short brown hair wearing glasses and a gray sweatshirt gets in your way, watch out, she means business.