No Black Friday for me!

First of all, I want to say that I hope you and yours had a great Thanksgiving. Yesterday was a double celebration for us since it was also my Dad's 50th birthday :)

I am TRYING to catch up in sessions and will post sessions on this blog as soon as I can...

Now for my story...

Growing up, my family never did the whole "black friday, shopping-day-after-thanksgiving" shopping day the next morning. I am guessing we were lazy and rather sleep in, but I now know my mom knew better....

Forward to 2006... The midnight after Thanksgiving in 2006, my friend Amy convinced me to go with her to the Disney Store Outlet for their "midnight madness" sale-- and madness it was... it was like nothing I had ever seen... the first few minutes were fine, but as more people got into the store, the more aggressive these people got. I remember the workers would go to receiving (the back of the store) to get more toys and as soon as they would open the door, people were attacking the poor workers and ripping the "goodies" out of their arms. People where fighting about what was theirs and ripping things out of each others hands like two little preschoolers that did not want to share a toy. People were vicious, fighting with each other and that was not OK with me. That was the first and last time I have done Black friday.

Now I know some of my readers will say that they have never seen this. And will tell me that what I wrote above and the following is just an unlucky incident. I will be happy to hear that... BUT

The whole reason I decided to write about this is because I was very sad to hear that a 34 year old man was KILLED at a WALMART in New York because he was crushed by the throng of customers. This is horrible-- a life has been taken to save a couple of bucks. I can't imagine having been one of the individuals who ran over this man and go home after a day of shopping and say "hey honey look what a deal I got, and I got it because I was one of the first to get through the door, unfortunately an innocent man lost his life"...

This man is someone's son, brother, and maybe husband and father...

This incident convinced me that my first and only black friday will be the Thanksgiving of 2006.

For those of you who are out there, please be careful and look both ways before you cross the stores aisles ;)

Here is a link to the story...