Edgework

A few days after Black Friday this year, I overheard a conversation. One woman was describing to another the tremendous experience she and her friends had had on a shopping trip to the United States to take in Black Friday. Oh, she gushed, we had such a great time! We shopped for ten hours straight, and we found some really good bargains! We started at 6:30 a.m., only stopping every few hours for coffee and a bit to eat. Otherwise it was “shop till you drop.”

As I listened to this conversation go on and on I found it more incredulous by the minute. In one mall, the woman reported, the big box stores had staggered their opening times by an hour. The first one opened its doors at 12:00 midnight, the next at 1:00 a.m. and so on throughout the night. Of course each store had its “door-crasher-specials” so every hour the crowd lurched forward to the next store in an attempt to get in on the best deals possible. By early morning all the stores were open and jam-packed.

Black Friday is the day after American Thanksgiving and unofficially begins the Christmas shopping season. It got its name in 1966 in Philadelphia where it was noticed that on the Friday following Thanksgiving the heavy traffic tended to leave heavy black marks on the street. What? Squealing tires to get to the next store? Who knows? In later years Black Friday also came to represent the fact that many businesses consider it the day when their financial ledgers turned from red to black – that is, annual profits began to kick in.

Seventeen states have made Black Friday a state holiday to allow more people to participate in this national phenomenon. And now I hear that Black Friday is attempting to cross the 49th parallel. We kept the Americans below the line a century and a half ago, but this time it looks like we will just welcome them in with open arms. It’s good for business, you know!

I am less dismayed than sad about it all. What have we as North Americans done to ourselves? Historically, Thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which we returned thanks to our Creator for supplying the necessities of life. Christmas, which comes a month later, also was an historic religious holiday in which we celebrated the birth of the Savior of the World.

Now Black Friday has snuck its way into this holy season. And many Christians have jumped on the Black Friday bandwagon and are going along for the ride. The turkey in our bellies has barely begun to digest before we scramble out the door and into the “dark night” called Black Friday. After all, we want to be well prepared for the next Christian holiday in a few weeks, right?

What this tells me is that, to a large extent, North American Christians have allowed consumer culture to trump their faith foundations. Black Friday has basically swallowed up both Thanksgiving and Christmas as we have turned our former Christian holidays into occasions to worship consumerism.

This has been a long time coming. It is not as though one day we decided to give up the essence of our Christian celebrations to worship idols. But whether it has overtaken us slowly or quickly, the end result is still the same.
A few weeks ago, Val Hiebert of Providence University College, presented a public lecture in Steinbach on “Simpler Living.” Her presentation was quite moving. At least she convinced me that jumping off consumer bandwagons like Black Friday would be a good thing to do.

Hiebert informed us that there actually was a time when shopping as we know it did not exist. People went to various “shops” in the village to pick up supplies that they needed. But with the Industrial Revolution came some game changers. Large factories began pouring out massive amounts of products which needed to be sold to keep the factories running and protect the jobs of the workers.

So gradually advertising goods produced in factories came into vogue, not only to help people identify where they could get the products they needed, but to generate a desire for products they had not even heard of before. Blend in the advent of fashion, in which people were encouraged to buy new products before old ones were worn out, and we had all the basic ingredients needed for a consumer culture to flourish.

Department stores that arrived in the late 19th century became the undisputed centers for the new religion of consumerism. Not allowed any degree of prominence in politics, business or religion, women could however spend their days at department stores. Here they could be seduced by the myth of the good life and the perfect body, cloaked as it was in fashion. Of course since then, department stores have morphed into shopping malls and many men have joined their women folk on regular treks to these new religious shrines.

It was not at first apparent that the emerging consumer culture would be a threat to the heart of the Christian faith. That is more clearly visible in hindsight. But who would argue with the assertion that we have all participated in developing a consumptive culture that mostly leaves us lonely and disillusioned, surrounded though we are with widgets and gadgets our parents never even dreamed of.

Fortunately, there is a growing push back against the consumer culture that Black Friday represents. For some it is a desperate move to manage unhealthy stress. For others it is seeking a greater degree of social and ecological justice. For still others it is a spiritual quest to be faithful to their God. In all cases, the message is the same: “Consume less and care more!”

Count me in on all three fronts. Consumerism is a difficult and disruptive bed-fellow for Christians seeking to be faithful.