I drove past the nearest mall on the way to Safeway.  I was making a right at the bottom of the hill, so I couldn’t really see into the parking lot, but I can guess.  That’s the closest I wanna come to the madness today, thank you.

(tristan! I’ll see that and raise you an Isolde!)

Is my memory correct that in our youth there was no such thing as a sale between Thanksgiving and Christmas? 

As I recall it, there weren’t all that many retailers in any particular town, and those stores were mainly locally owned and run.  They knew that you’d be buying your presents from them and that the preponderance of their profits came during this month.  And we knew that our neighbors ran the stores in town, that they employed other neighbors, and that their profits stayed in town to the benefit of the tax base.  Thus, it made no sense to have sales during the buying season.

I also recall the “January white sale”, but that’s another story.

That’s my recollection, too, N. Made a lot more sense and was certainly better for the community. In fact, Christmas shopping excursions were very community based. I liked it a whole lot better. I think people bought less and we were pretty happy with what we got. But what did we know?

Linkmeister, you got closer to the masses than I did. My car stayed in the driveway all day and that made us both happy.

The only time I’ve even left the house today was at 7:30 AM when I rolled the garbage cart to the curb.  I won’t start Christmas shopping until it is actually December and I try to do most of it with local merchants. 

I was briefly tempted to go get my Christmas tree today but I took a nap instead.

You’re one up on me Terrilynn. Today was our trash day, too, but I forgot. So now I have a turkey carcass sitting in the trash can. Unless it stays really cold here this week, it could turn rather unpleasant over in that corner. Ah well. It’ll keep Terry busy this week, plotting how to get into it.

My neighbor said we’re putting our Christmas lights up this weekend. So...I guess that’s what I’ll be doing sometime tomorrow.

Weel, good old Wally World didn’t do that well in our local area then! I went at about 1PM and it wasn’t even as busy as usual!

Initial reports suggest that Friday wasn’t a great start to the retailers’ season. Although WalMart did better than the others. If that’s the case, it must have been dismal at the malls.