Next week most Americans will likely gather with family and friends to celebrate the annual thanks-giving ritual critical to American culture and tradition: Thanksgiving. The importance of Thanksgiving is being devalued, though, because a certain commercial trend gaining prominence—the ever-famous Black Friday. It is important to retain some sacred values in our society, and Thanksgiving fills that role—it is above both religious and ethnic heritage and can be embraced by all. Thanksgiving’s value is priceless and needs to be cherished. As a society we need to pull back our obsession with Black Friday and rethink our relationship with Thanksgiving.
One of the most important holidays on the calendar, Thanksgiving plays a variety of important roles. It very clearly marks time as the beginning of the holiday season. This season is not only a sales person’s dream, but also a significant period for many people who celebrate religious holidays as well. It is a chance for people to reconnect with their roots when they travel home, visit family and think about people who aren’t always active participants in their lives. It brings warmth, comfort, brightness and light into a part of the year characterized by long, dark nights and cold snowy days—especially for us Midwesterners. And it is an opportunity to meditate on our lives and be gracious for whatever luck or prosperity that has come our way.
The increasing prominence of Black Friday is eroding the important meaning of Thanksgiving. It is revealing a disgusting side of American culture—an obsession with want. What once merely marked the beginning of the holiday shopping season has turned into a spectacle of commercial greediness that increasingly seems to overshadow Thanksgiving and its intrinsic meaning. The desire to lure in customers before other stores has encouraged retailers to open increasingly early on Black Friday; what started at 7 a.m. has moved back to opening Thanksgiving Day. Black Friday is the antithesis of Thanksgiving—a major blow to the quality of American culture.
Although Thanksgiving has technically existed for almost 400 years, its prominence only began after 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a day to give thanks. In the thick of the Civil War, Lincoln felt it prudent to remind Americans that even while living in a house divided, and through the loss of family and country men, the loss of sons, fathers, brothers and friends, we must take moments to give thanks. In the proclamation written for the president by Secretary of State William Seward, Lincoln says, “I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States…to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving… And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions due … they do also with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers… to heal the wounds of the nation.”
It’s unfortunate Lincoln’s words fail to resonate anymore. Instead of seeing this holiday as an opportunity to give thanks and seek the betterment of our national wellbeing, we go shopping in such a manner that the ugliness of greed is madly and uninhibitedly on display. In the last five years, the lunacy of Black Friday has included the trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee in Long Island, two unrelated shooting deaths in California outside of Toys “R” Us, a woman pepper spraying other customers in California for an Xbox and a threatened shooting at a Toys “R” Us here in Madison.
In the middle of the greatest and bloodiest struggle in American history, this modern conception of Thanksgiving was about giving thanks for what we have, sharing with those who lack and a way to remind to be continuously thankful for the opportunities and the spirit of the nation in which we live and for which millions have struggled and died to preserve. In this lies the incomparable value of Thanksgiving.
When we return this week to celebrate and give thanks for our family and friends, our education, our joys, memories and opportunity, remember that this feast day is much more than a chance to indulge in food. It is an opportunity to remind ourselves of our values. It is not in an Xbox or the great deal: It is in family and friends, the love, the memories, the knowledge that we gain from things unto which no price tag can be placed. There is sacredness to Thanksgiving—it reminds of us these things. Before we go shopping on Black Friday—perhaps deciding not to go shopping on Black Friday—we should take a moment to remind ourselves that material want does not necessarily increase the value of our lives.
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