Today is Sunday, November 27 and Christmas is only 4 weeks away. That’s right,only 28 days. Have you finished shopping? Have you written your cards and those God-awful annual letters? Have you started baking yet? What are you waiting for? Get moving! Today we remember the birthdays of Anders Celsius, James Agee and “Buffalo “ Bob Smith. On this day in 1885 the earliest photo of a meteor shower was made, in 1910 NY’s Penn Station opened as the world’s largest railway terminal and in 1957 the Army withdrew from Little Rock, AR after the Central HS integration. In Burma it is National Day, in Massachusetts it is John F Kennedy Day and in the US it is National Bavarian Cream Pie Day.
I mentioned above those awful letters that people send out each year telling everyone about how wonderful their family was this past year. “We are so proud of Bobby. He has been at the top of his Third Grade class all year and holds the record for correctly spelling the most words in his class. Our lovely daughter Loretta has been selected to represent her school at the annual Girls With Potential Conference this year. Our son Joe has been working hard with our dog Fitzhugh and has finally taught him to play Texas Holdem. He even wins once in a while. My garden won several awards this past summer and Joe, Sr was awarded the blue ribbon for his cucumber salad at the church picnic.” UGH!!
Just once I would love to see something like this – “Well, another year has passed and, with luck, we will get to the the new year without our 11 year old Gunner killing someone. That would make two years in a row. Our 14 year old Betsy is pregnant, again. We are hoping to meet the father, if she can remember who it is. The 16 year old, what’s-his-name, has now been thrown out of just about every school in the county. We were so proud when we read about it in the local paper. My rehab has been going pretty well, I am five days sober, this time. We got news that what’s-his-name Sr may be able to be released from prison in the new year. He thinks he can beat the assault charges that are pending against him. Our dog Spike ate the neighbor’s cat, but that’s okay. We never liked that cat anyway and Spike didn’t get sick.”
The worst part is that people send them out to everyone thinking that we all care. I only get one or two. I like the one from our friends in Iowa, but you can keep the rest of them. Unless the letter contains a check or cash, don’t even send it to me. I open the envelope, see the letter, look for a check and if there is none, out it goes. If the people are not blood relatives (and some of them can be tedious), don’t tell me about them. Okay, I have vented and can now move on.
I have become rather disappointed with this whole Black Friday business. It used to be a lot more exciting. There was always one special item that everyone wanted and there was always a limited quantity of that item in each store, usually four or five of them. People would rush through Thanksgiving dinner so that they could get to the store and camp outside overnight to be one of the first inside to snag that precious item. Friday there would be news coverage of the stampedes and you could see people getting knocked down, people fighting over things and the few lucky ones carrying the vaunted special item, taunting the losers and inviting violence on themselves.
Then, a few years ago, stores started opening on Thanksgiving Day, showing complete disregard for the employees with family. The one thing you can be sure of is that the people in charge were not in the stores. They were sitting at home with their pants undone, watching football and falling asleep. However, by being open, they cut down on the Friday crowd somewhat. Also it finally occurred to manufacturers that if they had the year’s hot item, they could sell more of them, thereby making more money at the inflated prices they were charging, if they produced more of the item. They realized that if the store had 100 of the item they would still sell all of them and need to make more.
The final death knell for the good old dangerous Black Friday excitement started this year. A lot of places started offering Black Friday pricing back around Halloween. This was supposed to get people out shopping sooner and not waiting until the day after Thanksgiving. The thing is that Black Friday prices are not all that wonderful. They take an item, push the standard price up a little and then put it on sale at the price it used to be and people swarm to the store to buy it and they are excited because they got the bargain without all the danger.
I have said this before and I will continue to sound the clarion. WAIT to make purchases. Don’t even fall for the Cyber Monday trap. Just wait another week or so. That is when retailers realize that they still have a fair amount of inventory to get rid of and they start making the real price deals. And you won’t have to fight people to get what you want because they will have already paid the higher price a couple weeks ago.
This week our fact tells us that it would take 15,840,000 rolls of wallpaper to cover the Great Wall of China. I ask, again, why anyone felt the need to figure this out. But just to throw in a hitch, does this assume that the wallpaper does not have a pattern that needs to be matched? And how much wallpaper paste would be needed to put it up?
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