On Your Mark — Get Set…GO! It’s Black Friday!! Let the Christmas Season Begin!
Thanksgiving day was everything I had hoped it would be — worshiping God, hearing a beautiful message on “Instead of just Thanksgiving — make it Thanks-Living” and then being able to serve blessed communion at church early morning. I headed home to go into hyper-speed mode to get the turkey cooking with all the fixin’s for my family here in Frisco and my family coming in from Austin. It is so worth all the prep for the joys. This year I asked each family member to express their gratitude for one minute. Well, most of the adults couldn’t keep to the one minute rule — there’s just too much to be thankful for. I loved the grandchildren and their precious words.
But today is the day AFTER Thanksgiving. Shopping is in full force this morning — well, actually, it was in full force at 5 pm yesterday. Why is the day after Thanksgiving called “Black Friday”? I did a little research. Originally it was Black Friday because so many people went out to shop and it caused traffic accidents and sometimes even violence. The Philadelphia Police Department coined the phrase to describe the mayhem surrounding the congestion of pedestrian and auto traffic in the downtown area.
No wonder retailers wanted to make the name “Black Friday” mean something positive. So they did. They used the name to reflect their success. Accountants use black to signify profit when recording each day’s book entries. Red is used to mean loss. Therefore, Black Friday means PROFITABLE FRIDAY to retailing and to the economy.
Now you know a little more about BLACK FRIDAY. Indeed, it seems a bit negative to me because I see it as the ending of thanksgiving and gratitude, and the beginning of bedlam, hustle and bustle and all the joy of this new joyful season getting lost in the midst of the chaos. Clearly, the Thanksgiving holiday is over for another year. Yes, we’ll be watching out for Christmas sales now. After all — Christmas is only one month away and in the words of John Wayne, “Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let’s go! We’re burnin’ daylight!”
But, as I posted earlier this week, Thanksgiving doesn’t have to end when Black Friday indicates the start of the Christmas season. Christmas is too big for just one day and Thanksgiving is too important to only be reserved for one day. Thank God that President Lincoln in 1863 signed a proclamation calling for “a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwells in the Heavens……” And, I’ll take that one step further, one day is just not enough to offer enough thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God for his goodness and mercy to us. Just think, if we carried over Thanksgiving right into the Christmas season and if we purposely live with an “attitude of gratitude”, maybe those frenzied shoppers wouldn’t bug us so much when they almost run us over to get that “special”.
God tells us to “enter His gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise” (Psalms 100:4). Gratitude is that gate and doorway to God’s joy and peace, and praise is the key to His presence. Being aware of His presence may just be the key to having one of the best Christmas seasons EVER. Instead of today being “Black Friday” to us…..we could turn it into a “Good Friday”, that becomes the doorway to the beautiful season of Advent which begins this Sunday — that sacred, focused and deliberate time when we ponder the coming of our Lord from His heavenly throne to earth to become one of us. It really was a time of HEAVEN ON EARTH. Unlike the innkeeper who said, “No room in the inn”, may we cross over from the hustle, bustle, stress and mess that can accompany this season and do our best to make room for Him..May this Black Friday become a Good Friday to YOU today!