If you’ve ever worked in retail or ecommerce, you know that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are big deals. I’ve had clients who made 20-30% of their yearly income on these days alone. It sort of makes sense how this came about. A holiday means a day off, so people will have time for leisure activities such as shopping. It follows that days off near Christmas are an especially great opportunity to get people to shop for their upcoming gift giving. Enter the lousy marketers though, and suddenly, we skip past the whole gratitude part of Thanksgiving and go straight for the shopping.
Now look, Thanksgiving has complicated and somewhat hypocritical roots, but you can’t overlook the fact that it’s just plain nice to have an entire day dedicated to gratitude. As an American, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of about my country. However, it’s slowly being killed. Black Friday started as a day with sales for Christmas shopping. Now it’s just a nasty commercial nightmare that starts Thursday evening and ends Monday night. People leave their loved ones and their gratitude at the table, then go knock each other over to buy as much as they can for as cheaply as they can. Holiday ruined.
It isn’t just Thanksgiving though. Every holiday has become an occasion for lousy marketers to shove sales down people’s throats so that they forget about everything but shopping. This past July 4, I saw a commercial that encouraged me to “celebrate independence with independence from payments”. So yeah, don’t celebrate your country. Don’t waste time with your family or community. Don’t thank a soldier. Just buy stuff you couldn’t otherwise afford and be grateful that you have one year of deferred payments. Materialism is just what our forefathers intended, I’m sure.
Idiocracy was set 500 years in the future. Sometimes, I doubt it’ll take us that long to get there. We’re already losing sight of everything that matters. And so, dear readers, I offer you this – on your deathbed, you will remember people, not things. You’ll remember what you did and not what you bought. So take these holidays for what they really are. Make them into opportunities to strengthen and/or create new connections. Time away from work is precious, so make it worth it. You’ll be happy that you did.