A thought on "Black Friday"

When I got up this morning, I was going to go to Facebook and some other websites when I saw the following on AOL's main page: "Follow Black Friday 2012 Live" and the following came into my mind which I shared on Facebook and wish to share here:

"....what, had "Black Friday" become a major sporting event or a election that we have to follow it all day long? Are we going have Erin Andrews or Michelle Tafoya get reports from the shopping mall sidelines? Or have political pundits tell us how the winning stores were able to win over the stores that didn't so well? This is just getting sillier and sillier...and just becoming an embarrassment to a season where the focus is supposed to be on the spiritual not the monetary...."

And it's true...in a sense we don't celebrate Thanksgiving anymore , to many we seem to jump from Halloween right into Christmas...and now in order to make more money, more and more stores are opening Thanksgiving evening....the spiritual swallowed up by the monetary. This seems to be another instance of us getting away from our spiritual roots, where every holiday with a spiritual meaning seems to either be disappearing, watered down to a more secular focus, or assaulted by those who remove God from everything in this country. We now focus on glitz and glamor and things that don't last instead of the real meaning of the season which remind us of the things that do last and the meanings in relation to what God has done for us....Thanksgiving: a reminder to thank God for the blessings that we have been given, Christmas: a reminder that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, to give His life for us.....

A couple of years ago, I had mentioned an alternative to "Black Thursday" http://1ncisfan.blogspot.com/2010/11/alternative-to-black-thursday.html and maybe an alternative to "Black Friday" where the focus is on us, and that is getting back to a servant heart and use the money that you would waste on a gift that won't fit, not appropriate, or already obsolete by the time they get it, to give something to others who won't have this season and in doing so remind ourselves that if we are God's and He gave to us, then we should give and use it to let others know about the real meaning for the season....