Jill Montgomery:
She’s a Convert to ‘Black Friday’ Shopping

The beginning of the holiday season has officially begun with Turkey Day last Thursday. We’ve had the enormous turkey dinner with all the fixin’s and barely time out for the afternoon football game and nap. Now it’s all systems go for Christmas.

I confess that what has become a favorite Christmas tradition in our family was started with a sense of dread and a load of misgivings on my part. I’m talking about Black Friday. The premier shopping day of the year where everyone and their sister and aunts and old grannies with walkers rush to the mall to shop till they drop!

I told my daughters they could forget it. No way. You will never catch me shopping with those kinds of crowds. Wild horses couldn’t get me to the mall on the day after Thanksgiving! I told my daughters that they would have to truss me up like the Thanksgiving turkey to get me to shop on Black Friday.

I mean, look at the name. Black Friday. Is it a matter of life or death if you don’t shop fast enough? Will there be a fist fight in the sock aisle if management can’t keep the 39-cent special stocked fast enough? Should the day really be called Black & Blue Friday? Or is it a day of mourning for bank balances everywhere? (For the uninformed, as I was, the day is called Black Friday because that is the day that businesses hope to get out of the red and into the black.)

Well, needless to say after a few years of the girls’ relentless pressure, I folded like a cheap card table with one short leg, and lo and behold found myself headed to the mall on the biggest shopping day of the year, right along with everyone else. And it was great.

The shopping part isn’t that much different than any other time of year. There are some good sales and people are generally in good spirits, but it’s the people I go with that make the day a favorite one of mine. What started out as just my daughters and me has now expanded to two carloads of good friends and family. And this year we even dragged my mother along for the ride. If there is anyone who hates to shop more than I do, it’s my mother. She even brought a book along so she could escape to the car after a decent interval and relax. I never saw her so much as glance at her watch during the day and I don’t think relaxing ever occurred to her!

For one thing, we power shop in my family. There is none of that checking out everything in the store just to get a sense of ambiance. We don’t find what we want in one store but then check out the other places to see if we can get it cheaper somewhere else.

Nor is there any ambling along at a snail’s pace. No, we plow right into the action with our lists in one hand and a pen in the other to scratch items off as the day goes by. We buy it when we find it and move on to the next place.

We synchronize our watches, send out the troops and bring up the rear in case reinforcements are needed in one area over the other. Need an idea for a present? The older set have one. Need an okay on the matching of a shirt and tie? The younger set will let us know if the colors pass muster.

Need someone to move the dawdlers out of the food court? I’m your woman. With the prevalence of cell phones, we can even include the transplanted daughter in North Carolina, and brag about bargains bagged and seek her advice on color combos as well.

As the bags and boxes pile up, so do the memories. Each year we find a new favorite place to eat. Or a store that we just have to add to the list. Or a new funny story we will tell every year way after the season has ended. "Remember the year one of the girls got stopped by the cops on the interstate?"

Jill Montgomery hopes everyone has as much fun Christmas shopping as she and her family have had.