Thought of the Month
Dorit Winter
What a strange juxtaposition: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, First Advent Sunday, Cyber Monday. From a Thursday of almost pagan ritual, with a prescribed menu, and jollity as its main aim, a day on which we want to express gratitude but aren’t sure to Whom or to What our gratitude should flow, we are plunged the day after into an almost mob-like mentality, lashed by the lure of “a deal.” We should, we are told, spend money, do our bit to revive the economy. Breathless announcements in all media extol the civic duty of shopping. This year, because many of us have had to be more frugal, we, the citizen-shoppers, were courted and counted with unrelenting attention. Consider the following statistics, taken off the web:
The new NRF’s (National Retail Federation) Black Friday survey conducted by BIGresearch shows that 195 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Black Friday weekend (includes Thursday to Sunday), up from 172 million last year. The average spending over the weekend dropped to $343.31 per person from $372.57 a year ago according to the survey. Total spending reached an estimated $41.2 billion. According to the survey, nearly one-third of shoppers (31.2%) were at the stores by 5 a.m., compared with 23.3% who were at stores by that time last year.
A survey by ShopperTrak, which monitored sales on Black Friday alone, estimated that Black Friday 2009 sales rose 0.5 percent from 2008 to total $10.66 billion.
What’s striking about these statistics is not the numbers themselves but the mere fact that they were headline material the entire weekend and beyond. Buying as proof of economic health means that the half percent increase signifies. Intermittently, in the media, small voices counted the ways that you could make gifts, make decorations, celebrate Christmas without “a deal.” A search on Google for “make your own Christmas gifts” yields 78,000,000 sites. Homemade Gift Ideas Christmas: 1,210,000 sites. People, it seems, are looking for alternatives to 4am parking lot camp outs at Wal-Mart. Is that because of economic necessity, or because of shoppers’ backlash? Or both?
Squeezed between the media-whipped shopping frenzy of Black Friday/Saturday and the internet shopping surge known as Cyber Monday, the First Advent Sunday is like a candle in Times Square. You can find it if you know about it. For Waldorf schools, and those of us connected to them and their ideals, the four Sundays of Advent can allow for the grace of inner preparation. Then, perhaps, when the Twelve Days of Christmas arrive, we can breathe into their potential for peace. That sort of preparation can’t really be bought. It only takes a candle, and that could be hand-made.
