Dear Black Friday

Dear Black Friday,

Oh, how you've grown!  I remember when you were just a baby.  I used to participate - against my will, obviously - in your shenanigans.  I was on the selling end of the deal back then, and you weren't known as Black Friday, yet.  You probably don't remember.  You were still known as "the day after Thanksgiving," and nobody spent the night sleeping in cold shopping center parking lots just to be the first to meet you.

I'm not writing to lecture you, but I do wish you would reconsider using that awful name.  "Black Friday" was our name for you.  Sure, it started with the Philadelphia police, but by the time I was a member of that near-slave-labor retail workforce, it had come to mean "that horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad worst day of the year when we all work from open to close and want to die."  Some like to get all accounting-ish and connect your name with retailers' most profitable month, but either way, it was an insider term!  

It was ours.  It was negative - or at best an accounting term - ick.  It was not for public use, or intended to be the name of anything the masses needed to know about.  I'm not even going to go after the retailers or the ridiculous people who encourage their pushing of your day into the day that precedes it.  Most people know how stupid it all is, but whatever (I just received an email letting me know that Zazzle is extending their Black Friday prices).  We can't help that.  I just want them to call you something else.  

Retail slaves have so little; can't they have their negative insider nickname for you?  At this point, I realize that it's too late.  Black Friday is a thing now, and somehow everyone is on-board with it.  So really I guess I am just writing to whine about that sad fact.  You've been taken from the people who invented you.  I hope you're happy.

I'll see you in December, when the deals are better, anyway.

Love, Joe