Thanksgiving is on the endangered holiday list. It’s been steamrolled by Halloween, and now it’s merely a day of carbo-loading for a glitzier American affair—Black Friday. But leftover Puritan era laws might save the fading Puritan era holiday.
Yesterday the Boston Globe reported that a 17th century Blue Law in Massachusetts, which states that stores can’t open before midnight on Thanksgiving without a permit, are disrupting retailer’s plans. Stores that already announced midnight openings like Target, Walmart and Macy’s have had to adjust their hours. But the real story isn’t about Blue Laws interfering with holiday shopping, it’s about shopping interfering with the holidays.
Instead of families sitting around the Thanksgiving Day table sharing what they’re thankful for, they’re plotting a Black Friday plan of attack:
VIP mall parking? Check.
Coach bus tickets to the outlets? Check.
Team assembled to storm Best Buy for a $299 laptop? Check.
High on manufactured cheer and credit card debt, we’ve let retailers transform the national day of thanks into a prelude for something that’s quite the opposite:
Thanksgiving: Giving thanks for what you have
Black Friday: Buying things you don’t need
And what about the people who work on Black Friday—the modern day Bob Cratchits of the United States? Everyone who stocks, scans, and bags Black Friday goods before the sun comes up has their Thanksgiving cut short.
It’s especially lousy for moms who work retail. On Thanksgiving morning they’re the first to get up to put the turkey in the oven, cook all day, serve a meal, clean up, and then run to work for the craziest shopping day of the year. (And because Black Friday isn’t a real holiday, they probably won’t be paid time and a half.) Mommy will work like a dog for two days straight so that Americans can fight over limited quantity door busters, and retail big wigs can squeeze out as much profit as possible.
Instead of repealing the Blue Laws we should make them stricter. Who really needs to start holiday shopping before five am? It’s not worth sacrificing the little family time we have left to help push retailers into the black. What a conscience that our forefathers gave Massachusetts, the state that founded Thanksgiving, a little blue reminder about the true meaning of the holiday.
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Why cant the family just all gather around their ipad’s and order great deals on ebay or amazon.com instead of waking up too early and rushing out for “deals.” Sounds like a deal breaker to me.
Good idea, as long as we don’t spend Thanksgiving on our tablets instead of talking with each other at the table.
Why is freedom so terrifying? If you don’t want the freedom to buy or sell at a given hour, nobody is holding a gun to your head to force you. However, you want to hold a gun to everyone else’s head to prevent them from doing so. I wish people like you could spare 5 minutes on Thanksgiving to be thankful for actual freedom, and possibly learn to respect it.
There’s not a lot that we still hold sacred, but I believe Thanksgiving is a time to be with family or at a soup kitchen–not a time to be at Best Buy or getting maced at Walmart. It’s also a time for us to be thankful for what we have, not a time to rush out and buy what we don’t need. Big business manufactured Black Friday to get your money, and we’ve been dazzled and manipulated into thinking it’s the main course.
In our cutthroat reality, employees don’t have the “freedom” to say they can’t report to work because it interferes with Thanksgiving. But we all have the freedom to shop online 24/7.
Thanks for reading and leaving a comment.