Thanksgiving takes a back seat to Black Friday these days. I’m not sure when this happened. Wikipedia cites a couple of articles that trace the term back to the seventies, but the only people using it were bus drivers and police in Philadelphia.

I don’t remember encountering the phrase “Black Friday” until sometime in the last decade… but one year–I no longer recall when–I started hearing it all over, and at the same time the shopping sprees seemed to get bigger and crazier. I wonder which way the cause and effect runs. Did the media discover a growing phenomenon, or did the audience see their stories and rush to join the herd?

In the last two days I’ve seen all the usual news stories. It’s the photos that disturb me… like the one attached to this story. Those expressions… the body language of these people, rushing into a mall as they would to a lover they hadn’t seen in years… that transcendent *joy*. For a midnight visit to a mall, a night of 20% discounts. Why? What are their lives like, that this is their great holiday experience?

This sad little detail crawled into my head and hasn’t let go:

At Best Buy on South Duff Avenue, shoppers draped around the building waiting for the store’s special 5 a.m. opening. Standing proudly at the front of the line was Iowa State University student Aaron Kulow and a couple of his friends who had been waiting outside the store for nearly 17 hours. Their goal was to get their hands on a few deeply discounted laptop computer packages and half-off GPS devices.

Kulow had only one thing to say as he bounced up and down to stay warm in the frigid temperature: “Yeah, it’s definitely worth it.”

Seventeen hours. If the store opened at five in the morning, that means he’d been standing outside since noon Thanksgiving day.

Unless his family has a grand old tradition of Thanksgiving breakfast–turkey sausage, scrambled egg casserole, cranberries on their cereal–this guy has no life.