BLACK FRIDAY

I love to shop. I love to shop so much. It usually doesn’t even matter what I’m buying or who it’s for, I just love the activity of going to stores and purchasing items. I love going to the grocery store, I love buying clothes, I love exchanging money for goods period (except for gas, I hate going to the gas station). For me, Black Friday is the Olympics of shopping. This is the day we put on our game faces and prepare to fight tooth and nail with other shoppers for things just because they’ve been discounted. It is the highlight of my year. I love the pushing and the competitiveness, I love the lines and I LOVE winning. You win at Black Friday Shopping Olympics by either A) getting awesome deals on stuff you never knew you needed and/or B) completing your goals for the evening by purchasing everything on your list. This year, I did both. It was mega-win. I was the shopping champion.

This is totally how I felt.

This year I only had one specific item that I NEEDED to get and there were other vague goals that I wanted to accomplish. Number one, Cricut cutting machines were on sale making them half off along with deep deep discounts on the required $90 cartridges that make the machine actually be awesome and functional. I also had an idea that I wanted to find some cute shoes of a pastel nature and pick up Christmas presents for my nine (yes, 9) nieces and nephews.

Our evening started out at midnight when the local mall flung open it’s doors and hordes of other insane people joined for maximum deal finding. They gave away scratch offs at the door for prizes and added coupons, they had singers, the place was a madhouse. I was enthralled. My sister and mother-in-law, who were first time Black Friday shoppers, joined me as we did a lazy loop around the mall, scouting stores and marveling at the crowds. At about four am we stopped at the food court, already heavily laden with purchases, and myself being nocturnal by nature was ready for lunch. It was so crazy realizing that it was FOUR AM and the food court wasn’t just open, it was crowded. At that point we were ready to convene with my other sister and my niece to hit up our next batch of retailers.

Can I just say at this point that I do not dislike my niece. However, at four am, having just woken up she was the most hyper, excited, over-joyed little girl I think I have ever seen. I don’t think, even today, that if you tried to wake me up at four am, even to give me a free pony, I could conjure up that kind of elation. As irritating as it was, it was also very cute and I guess that’s exactly how I was feeling on the inside, underneath a thick layer of adult mellowness.

We hit Target and the lines for the registers actually went to the back of the store and then were starting to wrap around the back main aisles. However, we were only purchasing a few things, and in the spirit of “All’s fair…” we picked a register that actually had only two people in line because the people who were slowly queuing didn’t seem to realize that every register was open and at the front of the line, there was no one directing people, it was simply every shopper for themselves. Lucky us!

My next stop was to JoAnn’s where people were already lining up, a half hour before they opened. The thing about lines like that is that you never know what the people in front of you are interested in. They could all be after the awesome deal that you also have your eye on. These people, once nice people in a polite line, will shortly become your enemy. Luckily though, I was one of the only people who was waiting for a Cricut, and when the doors opened I raced in with my cart and slammed one in. Then, I passed my cart off to my mother-in-law who had braved the line with me while I started weaving in and out of people to snatch Cricut cartridges out of the display. That’s when I saw it. The deal of a lifetime. The at-home screenprinter I’d been pining over just last week…. It was half off. It had to be mine. I still don’t know how I did it, but with in one great feat of strength I hoisted the box up into the cart and proudly marched off to check out. We were done in about ten minutes. As we were making our way out, I noticed loads of people with carts loaded with bolts of fabric and was so unbelievably glad that I didn’t have to wait at the cutting tables for once! After a short trip to meet up with my sisters, my mother-in-law decided it was time to head home for a nap. With our spoils of war, we went home and crashed into bed.

Spoils of war. (Excuse my insane craft room.)

I actually ended up going back out to JoAnn’s later in the day to pick up some yarn that was also on sale. I had been totally distracted by my other great buys that I had totally forgotten that I had wanted to pick some up! This year was definitely a success, but since then my sleeping schedule has been completely messed up! Hopefully by Monday I’ll be back on some kind of track, but until then I guess it’s lots of late night TV for me!