Every year during the Christmas holiday shopping rush, I expect to hear a news story about one shopper killing another over the newest hot toy. Well, thanks to the recession, it doesn’t look like this year will have anything like Cabbage Patch Kids, Furby or Tickle Mr Elmo in big demand, but this year it happened anyway. Yesterday, during the “Black Friday” rush at a Wal-Mart on Long Island, NY, 2,000 impatient shoppers trampled a temporary worker to death, as he tried to open the doors. Then, over at a Toys R Us store in Palm Desert, CA, two men shot and killed each other when the women they were with got into a fight.
Police Reviewing Video to Identify Shoppers in Wal-Mart Stampede That Killed Worker
Two People Dead In Toys “R” Us Shooting
Nice going, folks. Last year I wrote an essay defending Christmas from atheists and liberals in general, and now this year’s shoppers tell me that they have forgotten what Christmas is all about. If I had known you were going to do this, I might not have bothered to write. For that matter, I don’t think the true meaning of any holiday is widely known anymore. For most folks, it seems that a holiday on the calendar is just an excuse to take a day off from work, and spend money in some shopping specials.
That seemed to be the attitude in my workplace, when most of my co-workers voted to move Columbus Day to the day after Thanksgiving, and Veterans Day to the day after Christmas, so they wouldn’t have to come back for the last Friday of both November and December. To me it seemed unnatural to move holidays that much. Not only am I unlikely to think of Columbus after I’ve been thinking of Pilgrims and Indians (For crying out loud, there’s more than a century between 1492 and 1621!), but the schedule leaves us with no days off between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, a span of almost three months.
Over at Pajamas Media, a blogger named Michele Catalano suggested that an appropriate holiday prayer for our time should go like this: “Dear Jesus, We honor the memory of Your miraculous birth by offering You this sacrifice, a 34-year-old temporary Wal-Mart employee. Amen.”
On a positive note, and in light of what I wrote in the Thursday and Friday messages, here’s a funny video that goes in the opposite direction, where a little girl gives a neverending Thanksgiving prayer:
