Well, it turns out that Black Friday wasn’t so black this year! That’s because Blackened Thursday has been eating into its sales. Which leaves the door open for Charcoal Saturday (the Saturday before Christmas) to take the shopping sales championship this year. Wow! This could be the year of the big upset. Black Friday hasn’t lost the sales championship since…who can remember?
It seems as though we now have more days dedicated to frenzied shopping each year than we have religions, let alone religious holidays. Which begs the question what is it that we truly believe in? The concrete, tangible, material dollar that we toil and trouble for almost every day of our lives or the ephemeral, abstract, yet faithful belief in a deity?
And why do we seem to tie the two to one another so…religiously? I wonder if religions calculated the amount of time they devote to raising money compared to the amount of time they devote to the worship of God, what the score would be?
In 2013, approximately 141 million U.S. consumers shopped during Black Friday, spending a total of $57.4 billion. According to Forbes, All told, Americans spend upwards of 1 trillion dollars each year shopping for stuff other than necessities. In 2013 we spent 7.4 billion dollars on Halloween alone (another religious holiday in origin)
However in 2013 Americans did give over 335 billion dollars to charity… That’s about 6 Black Fridays of spending or one third of what we spend on buying other things. Well, if we can’t take it with us. We might as well have faith in what all that money can buy while we’re here…I suppose?
So Happy Holidays! And God bless us, everyone.
