In the late 1980s when we were living in the United States, there were many customs held dear in the U.S. that were unfamiliar to Canadians. One of them was the way in which Thanksgiving was celebrated; in Canada the chosen date since mid-20th-Century has always been the second Monday in October. A salubrious time of year, when fall has arrived in full colour lending to the festive atmosphere.

     A Black Friday flyer advertising deals at a Canadian retailer. (Photo by Mike James)

 

Following Thanksgiving is the children's occasion of Hallowe'en, another social exercise in festivities accompanying the bleakness of fall leading into winter. When Christmas draws close, the frantic activities associated with incessant shopping for gifts culminates the day after, on the 26th, when Boxing Day becomes a shopper's Mecca in for bargains. Those are the fall-winter traditions of Canada leading into the new year.

While Boxing Day -- a modern-day transformation of traditional 19th-Century Britain's upper-crust tradition of setting aside a day when household staff and others in service to the wealthy and the landed gentry were awarded their gifts in boxes after having spent Christmas in service to their employers -- remains a Canadian shopping tradition, it is beginning to take second fiddle to the American shopping madness of Black Friday.

That the day following American Thanksgiving results in the frenetic activity of people thronging to shopping malls has made its absurd entry into Canada is not totally surprising. American popular culture seeps effortlessly through the Canadian social culture wall, a porous and welcoming screen readily infiltrated.



But for anyone who views the shopping experience with dismay when people become so enamoured of the opportunity to possess themselves of more material goods, seeking out favourable pricing, and falling victim to the ever-inventive clutches of social media, advertisers and public relations firms firmly entrenched in the profitable business of creating a hysteria over !Sales! and !Shopping! posting glowing portraits of the family that shops together stays together, it becomes disgustingly disturbing.

Shoppers were shaken up last year at Toys "R" Us in Wisconsin, when a woman named Lanessa Lattimore threatened to shoot shoppers who were waiting in line outside the store. A confrontation began after the woman tried to cut the line of several hundred people. Lanessa told CNN, "Everybody was cutting in line. But there was one girl who was threatening me, so I told her that I'd shoot her."