Black Friday? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: Please join me in welcoming our newest contributor to BCN, Kathy Manos Penn, a native of the "Big Apple", by way of the "Peach City" - Atlanta. Kathy is a former English teacher, author of The Ink Penn blog, and a communications professional in corporate America. Now with Kathy on board, I advise all other contributors to mind your punctuation and syntax.

    Not a chance. Instead we turned Black Friday into Beautiful Biking Friday. With no crowds at the Greenway, temps in the 60's and sunny skies, it was a perfect day. Though the cycling didn't completely undo the damage done by our Thanksgiving feast, it did bring smiles to our faces.

    I was hearing "Oh what a beautiful morning" in my head as we cycled the homestretch. Tunes like that never make it from my head to my lips as no one has ever mistaken my melodious croaking for actual singing.
Hugh (left) and Kathy Manos Penn (right) are ready for a ride this Black Friday, 2015: Above.    Click image to expand.
    My husband, on the other hand, always has a song in his heart and on his lips. For days he'd been singing a line from Lou Reed's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side". So imagine him cycling along the Greenway singing "And the colored girls say Doo do doo do doo do do doo ..." except he was changing the lyrics to "And the white boys say ..." or "And the Greek girls say ..." Fortunately for us, there were no PC police patrolling the area or I'm sure we'd have been given a citation.

    Based on the news reports, plenty of other folks must have also found something to do besides shop, as Black Friday is now being described as grey. That led me to wonder where on earth this tradition came from, as I couldn't recall it being around when I was younger.

    Google led me to this description: "... the term 'Black Friday' wasn't coined to describe the day after Thanksgiving until the mid1960s. Even then, it wasn't a popular term nationally until around the last twenty years." Ah-ha. That explains why I can remember going to the mall on an occasional Friday after Thanksgiving just to get in the holiday spirit and see the decorations, but not to make any major purchases. And, heaven forbid I'd get up at the crack of dawn to go to a sale.

    As for the day after Christmas sales, I only braved that madhouse when I had something to exchange and knew the selection would be gone by the end of that day and the one time I was in search of a new winter coat. I still have that winter coat, purchased at Lord & Taylor's thirty years ago. My husband would say that I'm a bit of a shopping fool, but I'm usually a fool with a mission.