Hobby Lobby

I'm walking across the parking lot to Hobby Lobby today, keeping the kids close, reminding them that they need to keep their heads up. They're still young enough that I feel like they need constant reminding of this. Ingrid has a pair of binoculars that she's looking through backwards as she walks, so that the whole world is in miniature; Ian is deeply involved in describing how Bam, the central character in the pantheon of his imagination, uses rocket boots to fly over buildings.

It's "Black Friday", the day after Thanksgiving. Granting that all holidays are artificial to begin with, Black Friday nonetheless has an inordinate amount of stink on it.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday; a day when I have no obligations, when I can ignore everything except my wife and my kids and hang out in the kitchen all day cooking a menu that we have settled on over the seventeen years of our marriage. At the end of the day we sit down and eat a little too much and remember how good everything is.

Most of the other holidays are loaded down with baggage. Jingoistic pseudo-patriotism dogs all of the nationalistic holidays; Christmas is a morass of confusion stemming from the simple problem of it essentially being two holidays, a secular one scheduled right on top of a sacred one; Halloween, which used to be fun, has become as it's popularity has risen, a target for controversy and minefield for anybody who accidentally sends their kid to school in costume for the "secular fall celebration" that has replaced the old Halloween party under pressure from a vocal minority who fear that their children will become devil worshipers if they're confronted by a bunch of classmates dressed as SpiderMan; and Valentines day amounts to the culmination of a month of advertising campaigns hell bent on informing me that it's a sign of me not loving my wife enough if I don't buy her a diamond and Lexus every February.

Thanksgiving, though remains mostly pure. Turkey at $0.40/lb when you buy $25 of groceries at regular price is about as far as retailers can go with Thanksgiving; and the nature of the holiday, it's focus on gratitude experienced in the form of a meal and nothing more, has, so far, immunized it from the crass commercialism, sectarian religious bickering and militaristic posturing that all the other holidays fall prey to.

But with "Black Friday" we now have the crassest of holidays set immediately adjacent to the most pure. Where Thanksgiving, at it's core, is about coming to a generous meal with a sense of gratitude, Black Friday is about being part of a mass of consumers behaving like hogs to the trough. We all joke about eating like pigs on Thanksgiving, but Black Friday is the day when Americans are exhorted to let their inner pig run wild.

I'd vowed not to buy anything on Black Friday, but here I am, walking across the parking lot to Hobby Lobby to get a can of spray paint. I feel like an idiot shopping at a store called Hobby Lobby, but so it goes. It's the last Friday of November. It's 64 degrees out and it feels like late spring, the air feels so great but it's not right for it to be this warm this late in the year, especially when we've hardly had a day of cold weather at all yet this season. I wonder if I'm watching the beginning of the end of the world. And I have to ask myself what I've gotten my kids into.

Well.... I've always said that if you can't have an existential crisis walking across the parking lot you just aren't paying attention....