Black Thursday Night

Thanksgiving is meant to be a celebration of life.  It's a harvest festival, essentially, which explains the winter squash I suppose. (BTW curried squash=awesome.)  Most years I make a point to really consider what it is that I'm grateful for, generally by making traced-hand-turkeys and writing things I'm thankful for all over them.  This year, I was too busy with school and cooking and childcare and such to do it.

Take that away, and our Thanksgiving feast pretty much turned into carb loading for Black Friday.

Growing up, my dad practically forbade us to leave the house on Black Friday.  Last year, I went to Old Navy for winter coats and it was a polite madhouse at 11am. This year, I totally threw sensibility to the wind and did the Walmart midnight sale with my in-laws.  Ben came along seeking cheap electronics.  Since everyone we could've had take the kids went with us, the kids did too.  We were way lucky we even got a cart to park them in. 

It was a total madhouse in there.  I had to dust off my moving-through-crowds super powers (which I was slightly famous for in high school) to get anywhere.  We got there at 12.10, so the stuff we were after was already gone (scary, right?) but we were still there until 3am because the lines were obscenely long. And Ben was there even longer than that, standing in line for his gadgetry until 5am. My in-laws went to some other places, but the kids and I were done.

Then, to continue the crazy, we went shopping again today.  But the really insane shoppers had gone back to their caves, so it wasn't that bad.

And the moral of the story is.... shop at Target.