Belk. Macy’s. Kohl’s. Best Buy. Kmart. Sears. Target. Walmart. Toys ‘R’ Us.  These are just a handful of stores that have announced that they will be opening on Thanksgiving Day.

What has happened to our society?  Where has our sense of family gone?  Why have we become a society that cares only about ourselves, and never stands up and says enough is enough?

For years, Black Friday was the traditional start of the Christmas Season — the one day in the year when retailers around the country would open up early, stay open late, and provide incentives in the form of sales for top notch stuff to entice consumers — like you and I — to wake up early to be part of the game.  Black Friday was also the supposed day of the year when retailers would actually turn a profit for the year — when their months and months of low sales and high overhead would be reversed on one day of shopping.  Hence the term Black Friday.

Somehow, though, all that has changed.  Gone are the days, it seems, when Thanksgiving was about spending time with your family — when you would sit home, enjoy a great meal, talk around the table about the blessings that you have, and generally, love your family and spend time with them.

Now, we are so impatient, so quick to want to move on to the next thing — whatever it may be — that we are bound and determined that we will allow ourselves to be taken away from our families by the promise of a great sale for some piece of rubbish that we don’t even need.

I wish that we were transformed back to a simpler day and age, a time when stores weren’t open on major holidays — in fact, they weren’t even open on Sunday.  A day when we ate a meal together every day of the week, not just on Thanksgiving — and we counted the fact that we had food on the table as one of our many blessings.  I miss those days.  It wasn’t that long ago when our society would rise up and be a force — when the shopping public would announce loud and clear to the retail chains of this country that we were not going to be shopping at your stores on Thanksgiving, so don’t ruin the day for your employees by opening.  In fact, don’t even think about it.

Now, we don’t care that we are taking away from someone elses Thanksgiving time from their family — all we care about is getting out there at 4PM to get a ticket to get in at 6PM, or getting to the mall at 7PM so that we can get a lousy $5 gift card when the store opens at 8PM.

I wish that the insanity would stop, that people would realize that they are being foolish beyond belief, and that, just once, we as a society wouldn’t allow ourselves to be herded like cattle just because some stores are opening on Thanksgiving.

I will not be shopping on Thanksgiving, I will not be shopping on Black Friday — the only shopping I may do is to support my local retailer on Small Business Saturday — and I’m not even certain that I’ll do that.  I urge you to do the same.