“Every day is ‘Buy Nothing Day’ in North Korea—and look where that’s gotten them”

In my latest
Time.com column, I bravely take a stand in favor of shopping on
Thanksgiving Day:

Just as you can’t have Thanksgiving without a meal that fully no
one actually enjoys (and a guest list that always seems only
slightly less arbitrary, resentful, and ill-mannered than the
manimals in The Island of Dr. Moreau), you can’t have
a functioning free-market economy without massive amounts of
shopping. Every day is “Buy Nothing Day” in North Korea and look
where that’s got them….

And yet we encounter stories denouncing “the war on
Thanksgiving.” Haven’t you heard, bellows Dean Obeidallah
at The Daily Beast, that “thousands of [people] will be
compelled to leave their Thanksgiving celebrations to go to work”
because down-on-their-luck chains such as K-Mart are opening as
early as 6 a.m on Thursday. “Stand up for the real meaning of
Thanksgiving,” opines T.J. McCormack at Foxnews.com, and “skip
the shopping on Turkey Day.” Facebook pages such as Boycott
Black Thursday and Boycott Shopping on Thanksgiving
Day are easier to find than the cans of jellied cranberry
sauce you bought last year after worrying the supermarket would be
sold out by the time you remembered to get some this year.

Enough already. The only thing worth getting bent out of shape
over is that it took the nation’s retailers so long to move the
nation’s biggest sales day, Black Friday, up by 24 hours and give
us all one more reason not to watch the Detroit Lions get
shellacked on TV. We’ve already been going out to the movies in
greater and greater numbers over the years, so why not also pick up
a Star Wars Trooper T at the Gap (open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
at most locations, by the way)?

Read the whole thing.