Once again, an amazing Thanksgiving season has come and gone, filled with lots of thanking and giving. There is nothing better than close friends and family sitting around the dinner table, bragging about their children’s accomplishments with the aunties and uncles, questioning your career path and grades, even though you are only ten at the time. Sincerely, it is a heartwarming experience that no child in America should ever be deprived of.

If you are even luckier, you might have had the honor of witnessing a classic Thanksgiving family football game. If you have not had this honor, I will give you just a taste of what it is like. Everyone rushes out the door in the lovely thirty degree weather to grab the deflated football, and sometimes, if it’s a really special occasion, a football turns into the couch cushion. With shoes and jackets marking the end zones, the game can finally commence, which Akash Rajan (’21), with a glint of admiration and almost certainly a tear in his eye, puts beautifully as “the peak of coordination.” Honestly, what could be cooler than Uncle Bob showing you his sick spiral?

No matter how fun it is being ashamed of not participating in ten extracurriculars while getting all A+’s like your cousin is, the true fun does not happen until after Thanksgiving dinner… the holy Black Friday.

Don’t lie to yourself; you have laughed at the videos of people fighting to the death for 16” TVs or better yet, you yourself have been in a swarm on Black Friday.

My first Black Friday was one of the biggest moments for me in my journey to manhood. I had just turned 10. Finally one of the big boys at elementary school, my family let me roll with them to Target. Hands down the best day of my life. At last, I could legally buy Pokémon cards instead of stuffing them down my pockets at Walgreens (shout out to cargo shorts).

The sad truth, I regret to tell you, is that this hallmark of America is dying out. Kids nowadays will not get to experience what I did. Once poppin’ stores like Bed Bath and Beyond are now bare on Black Friday. The ruthlessness of the interwebs has destroyed the desire to trample people on your way to fight over discounted toilet paper. The culprit is that there are too many great deals online. Amazon Prime, I cannot stress this enough, is so handy. Putting that aside, however, we should strive to not be like people, such as Sandeep Amarnath ‘19, who prefers to shop, and I quote: “online” for Black Friday. Who wants to sit in their underwear conveniently ordering literally anything they want instead of getting smacked by a refrigerator on their way to the fruit snacks aisle?

To keep it, as the kids today say, one hunnid, I suppose all good things must come to an end. We, as Americans, must accept the crumbling institution of Black Friday. We can now only remember when it was a duty for all people of not only the United States but the world, to camp out in front of Best Buy for an Xbox.