Sleeping In On a Black Friday

After a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with our folks and two of their good friends we came home and took a nice nap, and after that we dropped in on a heck of hootenanny at Kirby’s Beer Store, where our good friend Blind Tom Page and four other topnotch players from our surprisingly strong local music scene were playing some tasty Americana. After that we came home and watched the last hour of Martin Scorsese’s excellent movie “The Irishman” on Netflix, and after we finish penning this essay we plan to sleep late and forego the Black Friday shopping frenzy.

If it’s not too late, we’d advise you to do the same. The Wal-Marts are shopping malls are always unusually crazy on the day after Thanksgiving, and the same bargains will be available on Saturday when the shopping is less crazy, and for those who are up to date with these computer thingamajigs that bring us the latest Scorsese movie there’s Cyber Monday coming up when you can get even better deals and have them delivered to your porch.

Better yet that you forego all the crass commercialism of Christmas, or at least procrastinate to the last possible moment, and do some act of kindness rather than spending scarce money, as far as we’re concerned. After giving thanks to God for America and its democratic institutions and tasty meals and awesome music the nation rightly turns its attention to the miraculous and all-important birth of Jesus Christ, but we think our American ancestors were right to spend a only a week or so on it and try keep in it mind throughout the year and look forward to to celebrating Christ’s more all-important resurrection on a hopefully warmer Sunday Easter in the spring.

The weather around here was brutal on Thanksgiving, and probably will be until after Easter, but we’ll try to avail ourselves of the warming holiday spirit this cold and dark season somehow engenders. We’ll keep our eye on the nation’s politics, which looks to be turbulent, but try to keep the seasonal faith that it all works out well in the end..

The damnable corporations and the Christians and the popular culture have commenced the holiday season sooner than we would prefer, but our folks and their friends are doing fine enough despite life’s tragedies and there’s great music being played at Kirby’s Beer Store, so we’ll try to give thanks to God for each and every day. In a few short weeks we’ll celebrate Christ’s birth, and start looking forward to His resurrection in the far-off spring.

— Bud Norman

Christmas in the Information Age

Today is Black Friday, when the annual Christmas shopping season begins with bargain-hunters duking it out over some Chinese-made gewgaw or another in the store aisles, and as usual we’ll pass on the ritual. This is expected to be the first Christmas when on-line sales surpass those in the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar stores that you have to drive to and walk into and then interact with other people, but we’ll also take a pass on that.

As much as we resent all the current stores on the east and west sides of town for driving away Gateway Sporting Goods and Reader’s Bookstore and all the other locally-owned retailers who used to transform downtown Wichita, Kansas, into a winter wonderland during our youth, we don’t want to see them driven away by the computer or other newfangled device you’re using to read this. That would leave a lot of empty buildings, and a lot of unemployed shop clerks, and what with the drones Amazon is already using and the driverless trucks that Google is threatening to unleash it’s hard to see what space-filling businesses and jobs the new economy might offer them.

Such potentially dire economic consequences aside, the technological tectonic shift that’s expected to occur this Christmas season has a cultural effect we also don’t care for. Although today’s stores lack the personal touch of the mom-and-pop operations we so fondly recall, there’s still something to be said for driving to a store and walking into it and interacting with other people. The drive takes you past places that evoke fond memories and gives you a chance to hear the local radio, and if you don’t get hit by a car the walk across the parking lot is healthful, and maybe it’s just a Wichita thing but we find that most of our interactions with other people are generally quite pleasant and often have a very salutary effect on our mood.

Somehow, despite the crass commercialism and creeping secularism of this modern age, people always seem to become more pleasant to interact with the closer it gets to Christmas. Lay off the Black Friday sales or the Cyber Monday bargains, hunt down some fascinating shop some local oddball opened, and it might just instill some Christmas spirit. We also suggest you call your far-away family rather than texting them, and meet face-to-face if at all possible, and gratefully accept any invitations you might receive to a holiday party, and except for your daily visits here spend less time looking at some sort of screen.

There’s no fending off progress, even when it goes too far, but we’ll be damned before we go along with it.

— Bud Norman