Shopping...

At the age of 25, I can see the naive joy of Christmas presents in the rearview mirror of my memories. We've all had those times - squirming in bed, unable to sleep because of the anticipation of discovering the contents in all of the shiny boxes out in the living room. As time has gone on (read: when I started living on my own), I've gotten to the point where I don't even think about Christmas gifts. Sure I'll get something for Melissa, but aside from that, I don't purchase Christmas gifts for a large cache of people. On the same token, I've come to not expect anything on Christmas morning either. Priorities shift. Now it's about what's on the table to be eaten, who there is to spend the day with - things change, mindsets change.

Melissa and I are in that space between. We are neither beneath our parents nor are we parents to anyone else. That leaves us free agents in many ways and if you were to catch either of us away from the ears of those who may frown upon it, we would gleefully tell you we like it better that way! See, everytime I win a full run of comic books on eBay (Green Lantern Volume 2: issues 1 - 187 complete for example) or Mellie gets a realllyyyyyy expensive bottle of perfume at Ulta (Harajuku by Gwen Stefani perhaps?) - well, there's our time of getting things. Because we find things to buy year round, the gift receiving part of Christmas is somewhat irrelevant...

I am however, quite the fan of a good deal. I'm huge into finding great bargains in second hand shops (season 1 of Buffy for 8! Score!) - I suppose though, I'm not as much of a fan as some.

See this morning, while I was JUST going to bed; throngs of people around the nation were lined up around big box outlets everywhere looking to get in to procure great deals for their Christmas lists. In lieu of last year's incident which saw the death of a WalMart employee at the erm...feet of a throng of early bird shoppers, many stores stepped up their security today with many having never closed last night in an attempt to keep a queue from forming. By all reports, nothing worse then a pair of physical altercations in a few California area WalMarts occurred.

Black Friday has always been synonymous with Thanksgiving in my mind. It turns out, the terms originated in the 60's, well before my time. By the time my mind began registering and storing shopping outlet television commercials to memory, things bled into each other. Thanksgiving and Christmas were a two in one separated only by a month for the sake of letting folks catch their breaths - and catch up on their shopping.

Over the years, I've watched as Buy Nothing Day has sprung to prominence as something of a counterpoint to the first day of the year where most retailers finally see their profit margins climb out of the negative areas. Decrying Black Friday for its heavy exploitation of consumers and its emphasis on crass consumption and capitalism, these individuals in their most extreme have called for an end to capitalism altogether. While the sentiment is merited (I myself spent today in and didn't buy anything either), sometimes I've noticed it can be something of a trendy thing to embrace (read: punk rock types who worship anything on Epitaph Records and still think throwing swears at random makes them rebellious despite being in their mid 20's!). For these 'anarchist' types (who've probably never even read Emma Goldman or Alexander Burkman to get the true inner workers of the anarchist term), they view Black Friday as the embodyment of everything that is wrong with society - society consumes, they're greedy, they buy too much and they don't care about anything else.

This may be true on one side - but there's another.

See the thing with capitalism? In any 'free' country, a certain level of it is needed to retain a semblance of freedom and the ability to CHOOSE. Otherwise, you would have government sanctioned food programs instead of restaurants to pick from, no say on which service provider you would like to go with for housing utilities, not much choice on entertainment and all of those cool apps I see the punks tapping away on their iPhones with, well - those wouldn't be there either would they? Not without a heavy amount of governmental licensing and approval before each and every one hit the iTunes store anyway...

Is it possible to keep things balanced?

I'll tell you after Cyber Monday wraps and I'm hiding my bank statements...