SHOPPING AFTER MIDNIGHT
And Not Following My Own Advice
The alarm was set for 3:30 a.m.
The kids and I went to sleep in the clothes we would wear the next day so we could leave the house as quickly as possible. The plan was to hit the drive through at the 24-hour Krispy Kreme for donuts and hot chocolate and arrive by 4:00 a.m. to claim our place in line at Best Buy. Past experience had shown that we needed to arrive by four if we were to have a chance to get one of the golden tickets and be one of the lucky few to gain access when the doors opened. It was a strange kind of camaraderie that formed between strangers standing in line together … and sizing each other up as if competitors.
And I miss it!
Back then, I could complete my shopping list by noon and have weeks to do all the other holiday stuff—decorating, wrapping, baking, cleaning—and my all-time favorite thing, sitting by the fire sipping eggnog, which is challenging in Florida. Several times we’ve had to crank the A/C down before lighting the fire to avoid sweating. Sweating and sipping eggnog are two things that do not go together.
But that was then.
Black Friday was just a regular day this year. The day after Thanksgiving. We were visiting family in the northeast, which coincidentally was cold enough to have a fire in the fireplace without switching on the A/C. I was feeling nostalgic about Black Fridays gone by and sharing my story when the topic of tailgating came up. It seems another common thing to do the day after Thanksgiving is watch football, and there are members of my family who look forward to standing in a freezing parking lot drinking cold beverages out of an ice chest.
This concept of tailgating is as foreign to me as my love of Black Friday shopping is to them. Tailgating doesn’t make sense! I mean, what’s the point? The game hasn’t started. You can’t even see the field and the whole event takes place in a dirty parking lot! I tried feigning interest by asking questions: “Do you bring a TV to watch? Do you play the radio instead?” My husband quickly saw through my pretended interest and announced that I couldn’t possibly understand. Having said this, he launched into a long conversation with my brother-in-law about the color of the jerseys and numbers they would be wearing. What I heard was “blah, blah, blah … yadda, yadda, yadda.”
Nobody was interested in what I was saying, either. My daughter pointed out that one of the most common things she remembered me telling her during her high school years was, “Nothing good happens after midnight.” It’s true, I did say that—a lot. But Black Friday shopping was different. We had the opportunity to save hundreds of dollars! I tried to convince them with fancy marketing terms like … quantities are limited … and secret doorbuster specials, but nobody was budging.
It seemed that I would be the only one shopping after midnight.
