Editorial: Let’s celebrate Thanksgiving, not Black Friday shopping

As we enter the holiday season, let’s take time to actually celebrate spending time with the ones that we love. That is why it’s called Thanksgiving. But over the past years, the craze of Black Friday has ridiculously grown to a point where it is flat out annoying.

Instead of seeing commercials of Thanksgiving dinners, I see advertisements of stores opening at 6 p.m. on Thursday evening. What began as a family gathering to eat turkey and watching football has evolved to an early lunch and hopping into the car to wait outside a door for five hours to go shopping for an item that has been on sale all year.

I’m not a “Black Friday” fan at all. I’ve done it a few times, and it’s honestly not worth the headache to save a few hundred dollars. No parking, incidents in stores, and the real kicker is the “limited quantity” of that item on sale. Sorry, but I would like to enjoy my holiday with the family I still have.

“Black Friday” also puts a strain on employees. They are taken away from their family in order to run cash registers, restock shelves, and have people pull items off the stocking cart before it can even reach the shelf. It’s just senseless in my opinion.

Let “Black Friday” actually begin on Friday. Midnight is fine because it’s Friday. But these sales that begin on Thursday aren’t exactly top-of-the-line. It’s not going to pull me away from my family and I hope it doesn’t pull it away from yours.

The last time I looked at the calendar, it says “Thanksgiving” for this Thursday, not “Black Friday.” Happy Thanksgiving everyone.