Every year, my family gets together for a trio of Thanksgiving traditions - we play rugby on the lawn, a game we picked up courtesy of a long ago exchange student, then we eat a massive dinner followed by enough desserts to sink an aircraft carrier, then all the women plan their Black Friday shopping (reconvening the next morning to actually shop).
Just personally, I think that Thanksgiving should be a day for enjoying the good things in your life. What it shouldn't mean is running off to work immediately after (or possibly during) dinner so that stores can open on Thanksgiving instead of waiting a few more hours until Friday. Putting it mildly, I do not approve of the decision that some stores made to open that early, so I decided not to shop at any of them. Not on Black Friday and not for any of the rest of my holiday shopping. My two cents.
Anyway, in a good year there are some fantastic bargains on Black Friday and I do a large fraction of my holiday shopping that day, and pick up something for me (this year, I was jonesing for a new camera). Not this year. Oh, the prices weren't bad. But they didn't motivate me to get up before the crack of dawn to go shopping either. My general rule of thumb is that unless I'm going to save over $400, then I go strictly as logistics support for the family. Which happens more often than not, really, I don't really need a lot of stuff, and most of the things I do wind up buying for other people, I can get online anyway.
Normally I'm the "runner" - they go in and get straight on line and I go gather whatever. I only made it through about 6 stores before my foot started reminding me that it's still technically broken. After that, I claimed a bench in the mall and everyone left their purchases with me so they could keep shopping unburdened by bags. As it got later in the morning, right around 7 am, the bags and I were sent off on a special assignment to pick up several Nook e-Readers at Barnes and Noble. Let me say, B & N handled things wonderfully well. They handed out tickets for the Nook that guaranteed you however many Nooks you had tickets for. Since all the Nooks are behind the counter, that meant you could sit in your (warm) car and wait for the store to open, then browse around until the initial line went down, re-caffinate at the Starbucks, and still get the Doorbuster.
Overall, it wasn't a bad day, but I'm feeling some rather strong ennui. I am looking forward to our upcoming annual Girl's Weekend. Maybe that will snap me out of my blahs. Hopefully, I'll find a new camera by then.
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