Black Friday helps nobody
Dear editor: I found the opinion piece regarding Black Friday (Editor’s Notebook, Okanagan Weekend, A10, Nov. 25) to be disturbing in its apparent support of American values and traditions, especially the suggestion we celebrate Thanksgiving on the American date in November.
Perhaps you are unaware that Thanksgiving began as a Canadian tradition (as reported in thecanadianencyclopedia.ca)
The first Thanksgiving by Europeans in North America was held by Sir Martin Frobisher and his crew in the Eastern Arctic in October of 1578. They ate a meal of salt beef, biscuits and mushy peas to celebrate and give thanks for their safe arrival in Newfoundland. They celebrated Communion and formally expressed their thanks through the ship’s chaplain, Robert Wolfall, who, according to explorer Richard Collinson, “made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankefull to God for their strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places [sic].”
In 1606, in an attempt to prevent the kind of scurvy epidemic that had decimated the settlement at Île Ste. Croix in the winter of 1604–05, Samuel de Champlain founded a series of rotating feasts at Port Royal called the Ordre de Bon Temps (Order of Good Cheer). Local Mi'kmaq families were also invited. The first feast was held on Nov. 14 1606 to celebrate the return of Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt from an expedition. Having attended the festivities, Marc Lescarbot remarked that they consisted of “a feast, a discharge of musketry, and as much noise as could be made by some fifty men, joined by a few Indians, whose families served as spectators.”
To encourage Canadians to embrace a Black Friday tradition is to support a hedonistic, materialbased value system that is without true value; retailers make little or no profit on items sold while consumers delve deeper into debt with each purchase.
This tradition does nothing for society but reinforce a consumerbased philosophy that has destroyed the strength of the American economy and seriously damaged our own.
There is no happy ending to this scenario. The failing of the American economy is inevitable. Please do not encourage Canadians to embrace the same lunacy. Roxane Claes Summerland