by Rosemary and Walter Brasch
At one time, people placed carved pumpkins with a candle inside on their front porches to announce the beginning of the Halloween season.
And then it became a contest. First, best Halloween pumpkin. And then who could decorate their trees and hedges with the best fake cobwebs, followed by fake witches in trees.
Next came Pumpkin' Chunkin', where teams make catapults and launch pumpkins.
The beneficiaries of all this, of course, are the candy companies--which have steadily decreased the number of miniature candies and increased the price of them in giant bags--the card industry that began marketing their products not long after Labor Day, and just about every company that has figured out how to produce their products in orange and black.
After Halloween comes Christmas decorations, bypassing anything for Veterans Day. At one time, homeowners and businesses set up Christmas displays after Thanksgiving, but it takes more than a month to replace pumpkins with lights, displays, and inflatable snowmen.
For Thanksgiving, wedged between Halloween and Christmas, we get supermarket ads shoving turkeys, cranberries, and sweet potato pies down our wallets.
Overlooked in national celebrations, and shoved out of the decorating frenzy of the other holidays, is what is probably the most important day of the year--Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Last year, 87 million Americans bought more than $50 billion in merchandise in the four-day period after Thanksgiving. This is definitely not enough. We consumers must push that number even higher.
There are no home displays to commemorate what is the busiest buying day of the season.
We have an idea.
Instead of replacing the cobwebs of Halloween with the Lights of Christmas, why not decorate our homes and yards with the spirit of commercialism? It's definitely the American Spirit.
Because plastic pumpkins are replacing organic ones, and artificial Christmas trees are replacing those pesky biodegradable real ones, we can make sure that Black Friday becomes a truly plastic holiday. Indeed, plastic pumpkins will never go away, much like our plastic credit card debt incurred on that one special day.
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