It’s Black Friday and, for the first time ever, I participated in the madness.\u00a0 My wife and I have agreed not to buy anything for each other for Christmas beyond a few stocking stuffers since we are trying to reduce the amount of things in the house AND save money.\u00a0 But we had been considering how useful a laptop computer could be for work now and for travel once we head overseas.\u00a0 There’s no way we’ll be lugging a desk top computer to Haiti.\u00a0 So Walmart had special prices for a couple of laptops within fairly easy reach; one was $200 and the other $300.\u00a0 I volunteered to go to the store at midnight and wait in line until 2:00 AM to get a wristband with which Melissa could return at 5:00 AM to claim the computer.\u00a0 They ran out of the cheapest model early (which elicited a fair amount of cursing from my compadres in line!), so I was bumped up in price range, but it all worked out.\u00a0 So now I can sit at the kitchen table to write… if I want to … and I do, because my lower back is killing me and this is the most comfortable place to sit right now! My Black Friday experience was not quite as bad as I had expected – although I didn’t get to sleep until 3:00 AM so I’ve had a rather unproductive day otherwise.\u00a0 Overall, it just had a weird feel to it – I guess because of this odd juxtaposition of generosity and greed.\u00a0 Parents and grandparents were grabbing up hundreds and even thousands of dollars of merchandise to put under their Christmas trees.\u00a0 Very generous … but where does it cross the line, turning\u00a0into greed on the part of the giver and feeding the greed of the receiver?\u00a0 Last year I was reading a chapter a night with the Drama Queen (now age 8) from “Little House on the Prairie”.\u00a0 We hit the section describing their Christmas celebration and Half Pint told all about how excited she and her sisters were to receive an orange, a new penny, and a heart shaped cookie with icing (again, my memory may be shaky, but it was something like that!).\u00a0 Melissa and I decided a few years ago to limit each of our kids to three gifts under the tree, and even with that, it sometimes takes several days before the kids have removed all of their toys from their packaging.\u00a0\u00a0And it seems like the more they get, the more territorial they get over their toys. \u00a0My Throw of the day was a “stereo system” that played both cassettes and CDs –\u00a0dating from\u00a0when CDs were the newest technology around.\u00a0 I haven’t actually used the thing since we lived in Pensacola.\u00a0 Dats almost pulled the thing down on top of his head from a shelf once; he was rolling around in his walker, got ahold of the cord, and yanked.\u00a0 I dashed across the room and caught the falling speaker just inches from Dats’\u00a0big round pumpkin head. I bought that stereo while I was in college.\u00a0 If I hadn’t stayed up until 3:00 AM, I’d tell you about it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s Black Friday and, for the first time ever, I participated in the madness.\u00a0 My wife and I have agreed not to buy anything for each other for Christmas beyond a few stocking stuffers since we are trying to reduce the amount of things in the house AND save money.\u00a0 But we had been considering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7726,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7725\/revisions\/7726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}