A Short Trip from Bountiful

Black Friday. Despite its ominous sound, I learned just this week it refers to the day when businesses, supposedly, move into "the black." Those retailers might, even now, be taking a deep sigh of relief or expectation, as if to say, "It has finally arrived." But it feels to me like it has been a short trip. Just yesterday we were feeling grateful for all we have; today we are feeling anxious about snatching from the shelves all we want to have.

It is sobering to consider from whence this agressive day has sprung: Christmas, and the affectionate tug to respond to the gift of grace from God's own hand with a few gifts of our own to those we similarly love. We offered, in the beginning, tokens of our affection -- breads, perhaps, from our ovens; crafts, at times, from our hands. We gave some sign of ourselves -- something that sprang from our being -- as a messenger of fondness and appreciation for the experience of affection to those from whom we had received it.

Now we give what we are told we are supposed to by marketers and advertisers and retailers -- Cabbage Patch dolls, Tickle Me Elmo's, Playstations (in one iteration after another), and any number of personal electronics in my personal memory -- to those who will play with them for awhile before moving on to the next titillator that will be similarly forsaken. It seems like a good system for everybody except the giver and the receiver. The former piles up anxious obligation and debt, and the latter piles up junk.

I'm not sure if my saying these things is an act cynicism, of truth telling, or simply the voice of experience. It is certainly the latter. On both sides of the "junk" equation. As a son, I have been the benefactor of parents who did their dead-level best to please. As a father I have been on the desperate end, diligently checking items off of my children's lists. And as a householder, I have scratched my head at the mystery of where to store all the stuff.

I don't do much baking, and I am not crafty enough to make a go of such enterprises, but I have been moving ever so gradually away from gifts that take up room and toward those that build up memory. Gifts of experiences -- sometimes consumed, but always lived. No one I know, after all, has any more room to put things, either, and none of us has any business buying a bigger house. But we all need bigger lives, and we can help each other with that.

Black Friday. We are in Minneapolis today, and on our agenda is the great Golden Calf of wretched excess: the "MegaMall" -- the Mall of America. If years past are any predictor, we will buy little, if anything at all. But it is a field trip of grand proportions -- the decorations, the crowds, the displays, the music, the sheer vastness of the possibilities that eventually become more numbing than appealing. I think of it as "shock innoculation" against consumer viruses to come.

I hope it works. The mantra for the day is "remember Thanksgiving."