Here it is, the ads for Black Friday bombarding your news feeds, emails, newspapers (if you still read those) and even on Pandora. Stores opening at 6pm on Thursday night (and even earlier than that). Tell me how we're supposed to be thankful on a day where half our day is now spent waiting on ridiculously long lines for sales on material objects that we don't actually need.

Also, Thanksgiving usually involves a lot of food. How are you supposed to enjoy all that when you need at least two hours to wait in a line for a store that opens at 6pm? Do you really want to give up your Thanksgiving feast for that?

Thanksgiving and really any major holiday has become so commercialized that the true meaning behind the holiday is lost in all the madness that is holiday sales, shopping for things we don't actually need, and cutting time short with family to spend hours waiting on an incredibly long line with violent people. Thanksgiving/Black Friday may as well be considered the beginning of having an annual Purge considering every Saturday morning after the fight to the death for that new flat screen TV we hear all about how many people were injured or trampled to death (yes, it's happened).

We've become a society that treats every holiday as an opportunity to make money, taking the "thanks" out of Thanksgiving, the "Christ" out of Christmas. I am not religious; I don't believe in a God; however, I do believe in family and using the holidays as a means of getting everyone together and spending time with them. Our society no longer allows for that. Our society no longer emphasizes the importance of family and spending time with them, instead, we emphasize opening as early as humanly possible on a national holiday (can't open too early or you'll have to pay more time and a half to your employees) to make people wait in line for something they'll want to replace with a newer model in less than a year.

It's sad, really. And you all should be ashamed.

When you say to someone working on Thanksgiving or an overnight into Black Friday that they should be home with their families, YOU are the reason that they aren't. Your terrible spending habits and greediness for a sale, are what makes it impossible for retail employees to have a holiday with their families. If you weren't out at 5pm on Thanksgiving trying to snag the best deals, there would be no reason for a retail employee to have to leave their family at 4pm (to get a decent parking spot) and then set up a store so you can come and shop.

So this holiday season, think before you shop. Be kind to employees working on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, chances are they left their families early to rest up for an overnight shift or come into work on Thanksgiving all so that you could shop. Let's put the "thanks" back into Thanksgiving and give instead of bodyslamming someone into a door because you just have to have that last new gadget on display.