It's Black Friday and, for the first time ever, I participated in the madness. My wife and I have agreed not to buy anything for each other for Christmas beyond a few stocking stuffers since we are trying to reduce the amount of things in the house AND save money. But we had been considering how useful a laptop computer could be for work now and for travel once we head overseas. There's no way we'll be lugging a desk top computer to Haiti. So Walmart had special prices for a couple of laptops within fairly easy reach; one was $200 and the other $300. I volunteered to go to the store at midnight and wait in line until 2:00 AM to get a wristband with which Melissa could return at 5:00 AM to claim the computer. They ran out of the cheapest model early (which elicited a fair amount of cursing from my compadres in line!), so I was bumped up in price range, but it all worked out. So now I can sit at the kitchen table to write... if I want to ... and I do, because my lower back is killing me and this is the most comfortable place to sit right now!
My Black Friday experience was not quite as bad as I had expected - although I didn't get to sleep until 3:00 AM so I've had a rather unproductive day otherwise. Overall, it just had a weird feel to it - I guess because of this odd juxtaposition of generosity and greed. Parents and grandparents were grabbing up hundreds and even thousands of dollars of merchandise to put under their Christmas trees. Very generous ... but where does it cross the line, turning into greed on the part of the giver and feeding the greed of the receiver?
Last year I was reading a chapter a night with the Drama Queen (now age 8) from "Little House on the Prairie". We hit the section describing their Christmas celebration and Half Pint told all about how excited she and her sisters were to receive an orange, a new penny, and a heart shaped cookie with icing (again, my memory may be shaky, but it was something like that!). Melissa and I decided a few years ago to limit each of our kids to three gifts under the tree, and even with that, it sometimes takes several days before the kids have removed all of their toys from their packaging. And it seems like the more they get, the more territorial they get over their toys.
My Throw of the day was a "stereo system" that played both cassettes and CDs - dating from when CDs were the newest technology around. I haven't actually used the thing since we lived in Pensacola. Dats almost pulled the thing down on top of his head from a shelf once; he was rolling around in his walker, got ahold of the cord, and yanked. I dashed across the room and caught the falling speaker just inches from Dats' big round pumpkin head.
I bought that stereo while I was in college. If I hadn't stayed up until 3:00 AM, I'd tell you about it...
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