"Every day is 'Buy Nothing Day' in North Korea—and look where that's gotten them"
In my latest Time.com column, I bravely take a stand in favor of shopping on Thanksgiving Day:
Just as you can't have Thanksgiving without a meal that fully no one actually enjoys (and a guest list that always seems only slightly less arbitrary, resentful, and ill-mannered than the manimals in The Island of Dr. Moreau), you can't have a functioning free-market economy without massive amounts of shopping. Every day is "Buy Nothing Day" in North Korea and look where that's got them….
And yet we encounter stories denouncing "the war on Thanksgiving." Haven't you heard, bellows Dean Obeidallah at The Daily Beast, that "thousands of [people] will be compelled to leave their Thanksgiving celebrations to go to work" because down-on-their-luck chains such as K-Mart are opening as early as 6 a.m on Thursday. "Stand up for the real meaning of Thanksgiving," opines T.J. McCormack at Foxnews.com, and "skip the shopping on Turkey Day." Facebook pages such as Boycott Black Thursday and Boycott Shopping on Thanksgiving Day are easier to find than the cans of jellied cranberry sauce you bought last year after worrying the supermarket would be sold out by the time you remembered to get some this year.
Enough already. The only thing worth getting bent out of shape over is that it took the nation's retailers so long to move the nation's biggest sales day, Black Friday, up by 24 hours and give us all one more reason not to watch the Detroit Lions get shellacked on TV. We've already been going out to the movies in greater and greater numbers over the years, so why not also pick up a Star Wars Trooper T at the Gap (open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at most locations, by the way)?