Black Friday is a day for rest and quiet. I feast upon leftovers, read a book, play some video games and go for a nice walk to the park where I grew up. I can’t feed the cows anymore because that farm turned into a subdivision, but at least the leaves were nice and crunchy to step upon.
Black Friday is also known as Buy Nothing Day! It’s a movement for anti-commercialism. I love Christmas, but I hate Christmas. It’s a family birthday for us, so we like to celebrate it. As a sort-of Catholic family, we used to do the religious rituals as well. (Midnight mass staring at painted ceilings full of angels and saints is way cool when you’re a half-asleep kid.) But lately I find myself disgusted by the early celebration of the event. I’m not interested in getting oversaturated with annoyingly cheerful holiday music. I don’t think it’s good to get caught up into buying gifts for every person that said hello to you or asked if you want fries with that.
Buy Nothing Day was a great success for me. I got in an extra long nap and ate dumplings, turkey, stuffing, and noodley soups. I hope you bought nothing too!
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Good for you! It feels like forced consumerism; I’m under 30 and I never remember it being quite this forcefull. I’m glad you enjoyed your day off.
I didn’t buy anything on black friday but does Saturday count? LOL
Glad to hear that you had a happy, relaxed holiday.
This holiday season has been much worse than I can remember. Target had decorations out in September.
My friday wasn’t as relaxing, but pretty close. I’m happy to avoid as much materialism as possible.
I make it a point to stay away from shopping that whole weekend. Actually, I am trying to get my family to stop the holiay must-buys altogether.
Hi Mapgirl… yes, it’s interesting that more personal finance bloggers didn’t mention it.
Most days for me are Buy Nothing Days!
I bought and did absolutely nothing – oh wait, I made money by going to work!
I meant to send this to you BEFORE the day
but it’s interesting for future reference anyway.
I agree about the crass commercialism, and am not really ready for all of the Christmas symbology to come so early myself. But from the point of view of a PF Blogger, Black Friday CAN be all about getting really good deals.
Paul Stamatiou writes a good blog about technology, computers, gadgets, etc. (it would figure, he is a CS undergrad at Georgia Tech) – he had a great sort of “How-To” article on preparing to attack the sales, etc. on Black Friday. Worth a read.