Black Friday shopping for non-shoppers who want to make their family happy

For much of my life, I have avoided Black Friday shopping. In fact, I avoid most shopping, opting only to go to the mall under extreme distress, or when the pants don’t fit anymore. For almost all of my 50 some odd years, the Friday after Thanksgiving was for putting the house back together, hiking, and eating, maybe catching a movie, but never, ever the promised discounts for early bird shoppers.

Black Friday shopping at the Mall

I don’t shop on the best of days, and I certainly don’t like to shop on the worst of days: Black Friday apocolyptic Thanksgiving survival of the fittest to save a few bucks on things you don’t need for people you don’t really want to buy for yet are forced to because of some preconceived notion of giving.

It’s exhausting.

But then my lovely nieces began visiting from a land far, far away, and they love to shop. And I love them, and they love their older teenage-ry cousins, so it’s off to the mall we go.

We park, head in, with only thing on my list is to see them happy.

We stayed in Forever 21 so long I was asked not to sit in the window display several times by an exhausted teenage employee too tired to throw me out, but still on the payroll so obligated to threaten me with every walk-by.

“Ma’am, really. I’m sorry, but you can’t sit there. Please.”

I got tired of waiting, tired of feeling old and tired in a store dedicated to the young and restless. So I climbed out of the window display and made my way to the bright and shiny section, grabbed my size, or the closest there to it, waited in the dressing room line for longer than humanly possible, and tried on an outfit that caught my imagination, and I struggled to figure out who would wear it and when.

My niece, gladly and sadly, got it all on tape:

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NaBloPoMo National Blog Posting Month. Black Friday edition. Thanks for sticking with me.