Have you ever marveled at the irony of Black Friday coming the day after Thanksgiving?
Traditionally, the holiday reminds us of the first “Thanksgiving” in Plymouth. The pilgrims who came to America seeking religious freedom managed to farm and stay alive through the tough Massachusetts winter with the help of the Native Americans, and this holiday was an expression of their thanks.
I think that as we get older, the story of Thanksgiving tends to be less emphasized, but the “this year I’m thankful for…” element tends to stick around.
Gratitude is the essence of the modern holiday of Thanksgiving. In addition to gobbling turkey, stuffing, cornbread and pumpkin pie, we try to remember a little bit of what we are lucky to have in our lives. In kindergarten, my teacher made make us go around the room and say what we were thankful for, and we still do that at my Thanksgiving table today.
And it turns out that a national holiday devoted to gratitude may be a very healthy thing to celebrate. While religions, elementary school teachers and self-help books have always sung the praises of gratitude, it has only just recently been studied scientifically.
Robert Emmons and Andrew McCullough of the Universities of California and Miami, respectively, have conducted studies linking gratitude with personal well-being that have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In one study, groups of college students recorded the blessings, the neutral events or the hassles in their lives for 10 weeks. The students who counted their blessings were characterized by “more positive and optimistic appraisals of one’s life, more time spent exercising and fewer reported physical symptoms,” according to the study.
Luckily we have a holiday like Thanksgiving to help us practice focusing on these positive aspects of life and hopefully increase our quality of life in the long run.
And yet, while we’re still digesting our turkey, Black Friday rolls in.
We leave our families as early as Thursday evening, eagerly lining up outside the stores to buy clothing, electronics and gadgets to our hearts’ content. It’s a deal-hunter’s dream day.
But it is the very opposite of Thanksgiving, a holiday when we appreciate what we have. Black Friday is all about thinking about what we don’t have and how we can buy it.
Last year on Black Friday, a whopping 171 million people hit the stores, dishing out about $372.57 each. In the few days after Thanksgiving, the National Retail Federation reported an approximate grand total of $41 billion in sales, according to United Press International.
Perhaps a lot of Friday’s spending is on gifts, because after all, Black Friday is meant to kick off the holiday season. And gift shopping is certainly more consistent with gratitude than personal shopping. But because Black Friday has such irresistible sales, who of us doesn’t flip through the ads to make a fantasy-shopping list of all the items we want?
To be sure, I am all for a day when stores drop their prices through the floor, but that it should begin at midnight on the day when we are supposed to be grateful and content? I’d say this is a case of very bad timing.
Reach Hannah at hannah.wasserman@asu.edu.
