Black Thanksgiving?

Black Friday 2013

In my family, we have a tradition that all of the females (my aunts, cousins and grandma) go Black Friday shopping together every year. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we always pick up the newspaper and look through all of ads and make a giant list of the stores that we want to go to. There is sort of an underlying competition among us, we always see who can get the best deals, meaning who can get the most stuff for the least amount of money. This year however, was different. While shuffling through the newspaper, we noticed that about half of the stores were opening on Thanksgiving at about 8 pm. At first, we were all appalled. Some of the things that were being thrown around were, "That's ruining the American family time on Thanksgiving!" and "How could they start Black Friday so early?". My Grandma even suggested that we boycott. Lord knows that wasn't going to happen with the Tucker girls. Strangely enough, after all of the fuss about how terrible it was, we went shopping on Thursday night. Some of the excuses were: "Well, we can get more shopping done if we do a couple big stores tonight.", "It won't make a difference if we go today instead of tomorrow" and "It's not going to make a difference if WE boycott shopping or not, they'll still choose commercialism over quality family time". As you can see, sadly my family (myself included) gave in to the temptation. And based on the crowds on Thursday as well as Friday, I think it is safe to say that many Americans did as well. As more and more things start to take priority in our lives, I think family is one of the things that has been put on the back burner in the lives of many Americans. I also found it interesting how we all seemed to believe that we couldn't make a difference with our little "boycott". What happened to the fired up Americans from things like the Civil Rights Movement and other protests that were begging for change? Have we lost faith in the power of our people and our voice? Do you think that Americans don't want change involving our dependence on commercialism and loss of family time or is it that we just don't know how to go about doing it?

Tucker Thanksgiving Dinner 2013