What have you got?

I hope you’re really happy with your Black Friday purchases, because I’m going to make you feel guilty about having gone shopping.

Or not. We’ll see. (insert over-used internet slang and emoticon) lol 🙂

A couple things have been on my mind recently, and I wished to share them with you. So here they are, and in no particular order.

Enough with “Happy Holidays” by the way. We all know it’s politically correct, but we also know that you aren’t referring to anything else but Christmas. Let’s get real.

Holidays come around, usually once a year, and some get more attention than others. Lately I’ve been looking at the way that some of the recent ones have been recognized. Namely Halloween and Thanksgiving. Jobs, school, and mail delivery stop for Thanksgiving, often giving the employed and students the day(s) before and after a break from the normal duties. Halloween receives no such treatment. Work, learning, and the postal service continue with their normal routine. However, the stores seem to communicate a very different placement of importance. Halloween comes with much decoration, and great promotion. They have the decorations up the minute the kids are in school for the first time in the semester. Thanksgiving gets a totally different reception. They have a sale on turkey. That’s pretty much it. No decorations, nothing. Which is right?

Black Friday is over. The pinnacle of American consumerism. They make it sound as if you are going to lose money if you don’t buy whatever it is that’s on sale. Truth is, if you weren’t going to buy it anyway, you aren’t saving anything. If they were selling TVs for $100 instead of the regular $10,000, and you weren’t going to get one in the first place, then you are out $100 if you buy it. You have really saved nothing at all. It’s simple math folks. You don’t even need to go to grade school to understand it.

Now that Thanksgiving is past, everyone is already on to Christmas. But wait! Not so fast. I’ve still got school for another two weeks yet.

Christmas is one of those holidays that I enjoy less and less every year. I know, I now sound like a terrible person, a Scrooge even. Maybe even a Grinch. But I’m really not. Really the only reason I don’t like it, is the fact that every “artist” out there thinks that they have to make their own Christmas album, and then it get played at stores, and everywhere, and there are 45 different versions of jingle bells, and grandma got run over by a reindeer, and more songs that don’t deserve to get mentioned. Just because you make a hit pop album that sells like crazy doesn’t mean that you have the right to write/record/sell a Christmas song. Seriously.

Another reason I dislike the Christmas season, is because in America, it’s as if Thanksgiving is our excuse to be greedy for Christmas. People start asking for things, bigger and better than last year, trying to one-up each other.

Get real now folks. Christmas, Thanksgiving. They should mean more to us than Black Friday and Santa. Why do the days even exist? There is really only one reason for the two of them.

Here is the reason.

We have a merciful God.