Getting Ready for Buy Nothing Day

My plans

Black Friday has another name, and that is Buy Nothing Day. For the past several years, that is how I’ve chosen to celebrate. This year, 2020, it seems there is even more reason to do it than normal.

I went out to shop on Black Friday precisely once. I set an alarm and got up to go shopping with my brother and his family. I am not an early bird, and I was a poor student at the time, but I had set my cap for one particular item and I was pretty excited that it would be on sale.

I didn’t understand how this stuff worked, though. Black Friday didn’t mean that every single item was discounted. I went straight to the aisle where my prize was - I believe it was a buckwheat pillow - only to find that it wasn’t on sale. Then I spent the next two hours trudging along and yawning while my fam bought a bunch of socks. All that and I Bought Nothing after all.

I will forever associate shopping on Black Friday with long lines, surly throngs, and people honking at each other as they endlessly circle parking lots. For what?

This year, there is no way in hell that I would physically go to any store on Black Friday, not anywhere on Planet Earth. I wouldn’t go out even if it meant I got a coupon for a hundred thousand dollars and a free hot chocolate.

BTW you did know that hundreds of people around the world have caught COVID-19 twice, right? You know there’s no immunity and you can get it twice? Okay, just checking.

I guess a lot of people buy stuff online, and I’m not planning to do that either.

There are a lot of reasons why I’m into Buy Nothing Day. More keep getting added to the list every year. Right now the main one is that, this year, the search for bargains is going to put thousands of people in the hospital and a lot of them are going to die within days. Usually, it’s not nearly so compelling.

I always found the concept of a holiday that drags out over two months or more to be confusing at best. Why that one?

Since I plan events for the morale committee at work, I’ve put more thought into these things than I usually would. Holidays can be divided into the ones for food, the ones for dancing, the ones for candy, and the ones for gifts. Halloween and New Year’s are the ones for dancing, Thanksgiving and Fourth of July are for food, for example, and Valentine’s Day is for candy.

Christmas is the one for shopping, and that’s why there’s this rabid, intense pressure to decorate everything, pump perky music through every pipe, and sell, SELL, $ELL!!!

I can’t bear it. Everything about this season sets my teeth on edge, from the green and red color scheme to the tinsel and lights to, most especially, the music. It starts earlier every year, and every year, I flinch and head back inside for my annual holiday sabbatical a little earlier.

This time, the store across the street from our apartment put up huge inflatable Christmas decorations the first week of November. Now, on the rare occasions when I leave our building, they are literally the first thing I see. It’s hard to escape the festive frenzy, though I do try.

Obviously not everyone feels the way I do about the holiday that never ends - I’ve noted decorations still up well into the second week of February, and they start showing up in October, so somebody must be into it. Does it have to be about shopping and buying and purchasing and spending, though?

What I usually do on the day after Thanksgiving is to hang around with my family, telling stories, cooking together, and playing games. That’s what makes it feel like a holiday to me. There aren’t really any other four-day weekends when I get to be with my family and just hang around. We live a thousand miles apart, and it’s a pretty big deal for us all to be together.

This year, of course, I’m not going anywhere near the airport, nor would I spend two days driving each way just to put myself, my family, and everyone along the I-5 corridor at risk. It’s irresponsible and, frankly, unpatriotic to travel from a hot zone to a less-affected area during a pandemic.

I just read that 1 in 3 parents (in the US, obviously) feel it’s worth the risk to have a family gathering for Thanksgiving. There seems to be this logic either that “we’re too smart and cute for bad things to ever happen to us” or that “this might be our last chance to see each other.” As for the first, I won’t comment, but as for the second, let’s not make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, okay?

This year we’re going to hang out on Zoom, which everyone is probably fed up with by now, but we are all familiar enough with it that we can play games and gossip just the same. There is the added advantage that all our pets can attend, since they’re in different rooms.

Maybe this will be the holiday season when I don’t gain several pounds between Thanksgiving and the New Year.

As far as buying things and keeping the economy going, I think that this artificial seasonality and the social pressure to buy tons of gifts for all and sundry, I think maybe it’s better not to plan the entire year’s revenue targets around that. What would an economy look like if it was not a December-oriented consumer economy?

After all these years, I am firmly committed. Celebrating Buy Nothing Day instead of Black Friday means I get to lounge around in my pajamas, reading, maybe taking a nap, talking to my family and playing some games. The alternatives are driving in circles around a bunch of parking lots, standing in line with cranky people, and, this year, maybe picking up a lethal disease. Count me out.

Care to join me? The relaxation and debt-free part, that is.