Black Friday and Boxing Day

My teacher and I were talking recently about Boxing Day and Black Friday.  We discussed how big Boxing Day is in the U.K. and I mentioned how crazy Black Friday is in the U.S.  Nowhere else in the world celebrates Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November.  In Canada it’s in October, but as much as we love Thanksgiving the focus always shifts from the meal, to football, to shopping the next day.  I am using the term day here lightly, seeing as it is still very dark outside when you roll out of bed at 3 AM to start hitting the big sales.  By breakfast time, usually around 8 AM or 9 AM you are usually shopped out, but some people can stand a few more hours after a meal and some coffee, but rest assured, by the time 11 AM roles around and the sales are slowing down most people are crawling back into bed for a bit.  I have never experienced U.K. Boxing Day sales, but from the sound of it it’s just as crazy as Black Friday. 

Since I am living in Oman at the moment I did miss out on Black Friday shopping with my grandma and aunt.  Usually we wake up early, get a Starbucks coffee (since they open early for Black Friday), shop for a few hours in the small cities near their houses (where people are so nice they’d hand over the last of something if you were giving it as a gift instead of keeping it for themselves), get some breakfast and go back home and take a nap.  My teacher was saying how she missed Boxing Day in the U.K. and that she had gone to one of the sales here in Muscat, which was nothing close to the craziness that occurs in the U.S. or U.K.

So if you are going to be in the U.S. on Black Friday or the U.K. on Boxing Day it is definitely worth your while to wake up at 3 or 4 AM once in your life and enjoy the madness and crazy low prices.