Happy Belated Thanksgiving--that commercial holiday that gets smashed between the commercial giants Halloween and Christmas. That comment probably tells you all you need to know about how I celebrate it. But a couple of blogs has me rethinking the attitude.

The first is from Interweave and the second from 5 Acres and a Dream. Neither one involves shopping or stuffing your face till you burst. We should shift the focus to interacting with family and friends and to our own personal accomplishments and what makes us happy. And perhaps we should not make it a "national" holiday that touts a false history dominated by one of our many groups at the expense of others.

We normally don't shop on Black Friday but decided to do so today because we needed a some groceries and thought it would be good to combine errands. I have two new cross-stitch projects that I needed embroidery floss for. Wouldn't you know it--I have seven bobbin boxes of DMC floss and didn't have almost 20 of the colors called for. The trip to Walgreens for a couple of our daily supplements we were nearly out of went smoothly, as in "hardly anyone else in the store." The grocery store was more crowded than usual but we went through in good time. We scratch the trip to the home improvement/hardware store when we didn't see a single empty parking from the street. I have never seen it that crowded. We found a good parking space at Michaels which was also very crowded. I have never seen so many crafters in that store at one time. Usually we are among, perhaps, half a dozen customers. We did make it through in good time but the experience has confirmed our usual practice: no shopping of any kind on Black Friday.