days like Black Friday are usually pretty quiet.
Except for the reporter(s) writing stories about Black Friday, of course!
Here it's the same as Brian reports from down under. We get bombarded with Black Friday sales and it just doesn't make sense. 
That's crazy! Especially since in the United States, lots of people have that Friday off of work, so it at least makes (some) sense for them to go shopping.
Same kind of invasion is true for Valentine's Day and Halloween. Both days were mostly unknown and totally unheeded in Germany until maybe ten, fifteen years ago. I don't mind new/changing traditions per se, but in all three cases it's crystal clear that it is the big retail chains who push them. So yes, I do resent and refuse to take part. Apart from adorable little ones coming for candy on Halloween of course. That's just too cute and I always make sure to have some extra candy ready 
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Valentine's Day is kind of fun and one needn't get too carried away. A card or a box of chocolates or other small gift, maybe a nice dinner -- sure, they're encouraged by the card and candy manufacturers, retail stores and restaurants. But they're pretty low key and a good excuse to be nice to your loved ones.
Halloween is a different story. I loved it as a kid Halloween but, in more recent years, it has come to seem like way too much trouble. First there's the yard decorations. I've carved jack-o-lanterns for years but finally got sick of it. It's messy and time consuming. When the kids were little we had fun, semi-natural things -- a little bit of spider webbing around the porch pillars, a scarecrow or two made by the kids using old clothes stuffed with leaves and plastic masks for faces, ghosts -- made of Styrofoam balls and pieces of white sheet, with faces the kids drew in permanent marker -- dangling from the trees, and of course the jack-o-lanterns. But some people go way overboard and turn their whole front yards into fake graveyards, spiderwebs on all their trees, and the like.
Then the trauma of the costumes! Deciding what to pick, possibly regretting the choice, the mess of putting it together. ... First your own, if you need one, then the kids'. At one point, my boys started just opting for fake wounds, maybe with a knife sticking out or something, so getting dressed left the bathroom splattered with fake blood. (That's harder to clean than real blood, someone at work said. Yes, I replied, if you have to clean up blood splattered all over your bathroom, you'd definitely rather have it be real blood!) Then the trick-or-treaters. You never know how much candy to get -- two bags? five bags? -- because the numbers are highly unpredictable, and if it's a kind you like you're always in danger of eating too much of it yourself. On Halloween night, you have to spend the evening jumping up to answer the front door, the dog gets too excited and keeps trying to get out and visit with the trick-or-treaters ...
I know I sound like a Halloween scrooge. These days I keep it very low key. Get a pumpkin but don't carve it. Put up a few old decorations from long ago -- a blinking fake jack-o-lantern, a smallish plastic light-up skeleton, maybe one of those old ghosts -- in early evening. Take them down at the end of the night. Halloween decorations look more pathetic after the holiday than Christmas decorations do (plus Christmas decorations are festive for days or weeks before the holiday and at least a week or so after, through New Year's Day).
This year on Halloween I wasn't even home. Some friends wanted to take me out for my birthday and Oct. 31 was the night most people were free. So I turned out the lights, missed all the trick-or-treaters, and had a fun time!
Topic: Cellar Scribblings (Read 12530870 times)