Soon television will be flooded with some of your favorite Christmas classics, such as Miracle on 34th St., A Wonderful Life, The Santa Clause, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and A Christmas Story. The child in me always preferred the animated favorites: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, A Muppet Christmas, and my favorite, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Each one of these movies are great in their own unique way, but the moral to all is the selflessness of the Christmas Spirit can trump any problem and bring warmth to any life.
After witnessing some of the atrocities that occurred this Black Friday, one cannot help but wonder how amiss we are with the meaning of Christmas.
In a California Toys 'R' Us, two men fired their sidearms after their female companions entered a bloodied fight. The event culminated in the loss of both mens’ lives and also a sense of shopping safety. To quote bystander Joan Barrick, “All I was thinking was… I don’t want to die today.” Not wanting to compromise next year’s shopping, Toys 'R' Us dismissed the shooting as a “personal dispute” and therefore “inaccurate to associate [it] with Black Friday.”
Black Friday was worse for Jdimytai Damour, a part-time Wal-Mart employee who wiped the dust out of his eyes to report to his job early that morning. According to police reports and the New York Daily News, Damour was assigned crowd control at the store entrance – an arduous task overseeing an unruly collection of 2,000 people eagerly waiting for the 5:00 am opening. Shoppers to the rear of the crowd started chanting “Push the doors in!” and within moments, the doors barricaded off the hinges, followed by a mob that “bum rushed” a group of employees who tried to form a human chain to keep the shoppers at bay.
Their yielding approach was in vain as several people were pummeled over, Damour included. Fellow Wal-Mart staff members scrambled and leaped “on top of vending machines” to avoid the mayhem of shoppers (who “yelled like savages”) until they could eventually reach Damour. The thirty-four-year-old died almost instantly of a heart attack.
In turn, the raucous toppled four shoppers, including a pregnant woman who, after being stepped on, lost her 8-month-old fetus.
All this for Guitar Hero World Tour for $59 or a 50” Samsung LCD TV for $798?
This might be a series of rhetorical questions, but what has happened to humanity during a season of giving? With behavior like this, is it difficult to imagine ourselves in A Wonderful Life where angels receive their wings? Is Black Friday nothing more than the search for this year’s fashionable “Red-Ryder BB Gun?” How would the Santa from Miracle on 34th Street come back to judge us – as naughty or nice? Or better yet, what of the judgment the (oft-forgot) namesake of the holiday, Jesus Christ?
We don’t need Jack Skellington or Tim Burton to identify with a Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s a Grinch that lies within, and for many of us, emerges on an appropriately named Black Friday.
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