Curing the Black Friday Blues
November 24, 2008
Thanksgiving. I appreciate this holiday for its genuineness and simplicity. It’s known for family time, rest, and warm, hearty (and relatively local) food. It’s also refreshingly unmarketable. Although you can now send Thanksgiving cards and place giant inflatable turkeys on your front lawn, nothing about Thanksgiving rivals the outrageous commercialization of Christmas. Turkeys really aren’t the most adorable animals out there, so they don’t have a lot of advertising appeal. And brown and orange twinkle lights? We still have enough sense to hold off on those.
However. The day after Thanksgiving is when we seem to sacrifice our sense to the gods of materialism. All the heartwarming, soporific effects of the Thanksgiving holiday evaporate in an instant, and we’re driven into the cold air to wait for hours in serpentine lines with hundreds of other disgruntled holiday shoppers, all in pursuit of elusive Black Friday sales.
But a coalition of Black Friday resisters is emerging, and its efforts are galvanizing folks to savor the un-bought joys of the holiday season by creating gifts, purchasing gifts that support good work and ministry throughout the world, buying fairly made products, or buying nothing at all.
While a traditional Christmas gift—like many of those we purchase on Black Friday—might begin with good intentions and end up as a pile of plastic on its way to the landfill, gifts that come out of creativity and compassion give continually to creation and God’s people. Clean water, a handmade scarf, time well spent, items made from natural materials and by craftsmen receiving fair wages—all of these are gifts we can give to loved ones and strangers this season. And by giving gifts of the heart, we give the gift of good stewardship and abundance to the earth.
Where do you find good alternative gifts to give during the holidays? And how will you be enjoying Black Friday, now that you won’t be rushing through department store aisles?
Kendra Langdon Juskus is managing editor for Creation Care magazine. Creation Care magazine. She lives with her husband in Illinois.
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