War is all Hell

Yes...yes it is.  There is no one like William Tecumseh Sherman for a pithy quote.  But anyway, may I just take a moment to say that the War On Christmas is a load of crap.  The War on Thanksgiving on the other hand, is apparently quite real, and almost at our throats.

I have point this out before, but I simply LOVE Thanksgiving.  It is quite my favorite Holiday of the year, because it is simple, it is low-key, and it doesn't involve the massive spending of cash.  You simply gather together your friends and loved ones, eat a stupifyingly fabulous dinner, possibly watch football, exchange all of the old stories that you've been talking about for the past thirty years and maybe take a nap before dessert. 

It's lovely.  No fancy decorations are required, although having pumpkins and gourds and Fall leaves, do look nice, as does that giant Turkey platter in the shape of a...well a Turkey.  You get to get all the nice dishes out for a change, not to mention the good silverware and the good glasses, and figure out how to squeeze twenty people into your dining room.  The children who may be in their twenties by now, still have to sit at the kids table, and probably will until they start hosting their OWN Thanksgivings, but secretly, they prefer it that way anyhow. 

And there is pie.  God, how I love pie.  Any kind of pie.  Even Lemon Meringue, which is probably my least favorite.  Still it's pie.  And while there is a certain amount of stress involved in the actual cooking of this sumptuous feast, it is still a lot less pressure than Christmas. 

Trust me, Christmas is in control.  Christmas is trying to horn in on Thanksgiving.  It wasn't enough that the stores had to create the entire idea of "Black Friday".  It's bad enough that they start playing Christmas music the day after Halloween.  The decorations have been up at the malls for a couple of weeks now.  The catalogs have been arriving in the mail since September.

But when, in the name of Consumerism, stores actually decide to OPEN UP ON THANKSGIVING ITSELF...then I say that it has Gone Too Far.  Are there actually people who can't wait a couple more hours to go and get that $30 DVD player?  Is it really fair to drag the poor people who work at Target, Sears and Wal-Mart away from their families and their own Holiday, just so that someone gets an extra 10% off of something?  We are ruining one Holiday, in order to get stuff for another Holiday.  That's a little crazy.  Wait...that's a LOT crazy.

I will not be shopping on Black Friday.  I will not be shopping at Target or Sears or Wal-mart.  There is nothing that I want to buy that I cannot buy somewhere else that didn't haul in some poor sales clerk on their day off.  It's not in the spirit of Christmas for one thing, and the executives who have come up with this idiocy deserve nothing but a lump of coal in their stockings. 

Bah.