Toastmasters-How to Say It Speech-Friday Bloody Friday...with a dash of Thursday.

So, how many people took part in the annual ritualistic suicide attempt known as Black Friday shopping a week and a half ago?

I myself detest this day of department store horror more than Santa Clause hates taking his insulin shots.

And yet it seems as though Black Friday and all the selfish, senseless insanity that comes with it is our official commencement to a holiday season which is supposed to be about selflessness, peace and good will towards man.

The term “Black Friday” has more origin stories than a fruit cake has ingredients and just like a fruit cake, none of it is anything you’d want to put in your mouth and try to swallow.

The oldest explanation dates to the 1800’s when slave owners would sell their slaves the day after Thanksgiving at a discount to plantation owners that needed extra hands for the coming winter.

Please note; this particular explanation is hotly contested amongst Black Friday Scholars in regard to its veracity and should be taken with 64.79891 milligrams of sodium & chlorine. That’s a grain of salt for those of you slow at your conversion tables.

Fast forward a century later to 1951 when employers used the term to describe the high influx of employees calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving in an attempt to get a 4 day weekend.

In 1966 the term Black Friday was taken into custody by the Philadelphia Police Department to describe the complete and utter chaos that took place on their streets due to the high volume of shoppers flooding the city like a Christmas day tsunami in Thailand.  

In the early 80’s the term was used by retailer accountants that had to always post a loss for each quarter with red ink up until the Friday after thanksgiving which would have high gains, therefore allowing the accountants to use black ink to reflect profits.

And by the late 80’s Consumer Corporate America took hold of the term Black Friday and made it a permanent part of our pop-culture lexicon and defined it as the day you blow all your money, all your patience and all your common sense simultaneously.   

Through the years, the monster of Black Friday has grown exponentially to the point that one day is no longer enough to cage this fiend. So now Black Friday has been allowed to decimate another day of the week as if it was Godzilla recklessly strolling through the streets of Tokyo.  Black Friday now officially starts on Thanksgiving Thursday.

This phenomena is known as Brown Thursday. So instead of fighting with your family over Thanksgiving dinner, you’re now encouraged to go out and fist fight with your neighbor over an X box One or Playstation 4.        

Fading to black a day early is an awful idea because the last thing our broke & stressed out country needs is one more combustible log to throw on an already blazing fire of yuletide rage.  

As if the deluge of psychotic Christmas music, cold weather & company Christmas parties wasn’t enough to deal with, we now have to start the shopping pandemonium a day earlier.

But it’s not even a day earlier because people (and I use that word in its loosest term) are usually lined up outside the stores one week prior to the first day of Christmas shopping.

Camped out on the sidewalk with their tents and tables and chairs and blankets as if they were nomadic wanderers in search of a big sale oasis, or a cluster of displaced refugees navigating a war torn country.  

In fact, if you were to compare a picture of a refugee camp to a picture of Black Friday Shoppers outside a Best Buy, there’s no discernible difference. 

While refugees are usually struggling to stay alive, elude death squads or hope to God the U.S. doesn’t carpet bomb their country, Black Friday Shoppers  face an even graver danger; each other.  

Because, it truly is war, ladies & gentlemen, when it comes to Americans and their wanton lust for cheap electronics made by a 10 year old kid in China.

And once the doors finally do fly open, all those shoppers bum rush the place in the same manner you see refugees stampede towards a U.N. food truck on CNN.

You’d surmise by the way these merry marauders act that not once in their life had they seen a flat screen TV 50” in dimension. They act like the apes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 that stand in awe before the monolith…and then proceed to beat the snot out of one another in its omnipotent shadow.      

The tragic irony of Black Friday is that hardly anyone is there with the intent of giving to another unless it’s a fist to the face, a kick to the groin or some festive pepper spray to someone’s already weary eyes from standing in line for over 72 hours straight.

Other than that, it’s an encouraged Me-for-all Free-for –all of barbaric proportions that would impress even Alexander the Great whilst he stood amongst the still smoldering ruins of  Persepolis.  

Stabbings, shootings and being trampled as if you’re some unlucky dolt who lost his footing in Pamplona’s running of the bulls is all standard causality that comes with the territory. 

What I’d like to know is how do these people keep their heads high when they emerge from the carnage of Black Friday with their arms & carts full of junk that they’ll discard in a month’s time? It’s tantamount to coming home from a Ferguson riot after you looted several businesses just for the hell of it.

I mean a lot of these Good Tiding Gladiators strut out of stores with a sense of victory as if they’d once again slain the beast of Friday and are to return home to a hero’s welcome.

Will this dark time that visits us once a year ever end? Not as long as this fledgling economy continues to limp forward on its broken leg until someone takes it out behind the barn and puts a bullet through its head.

Until then all we can do is hope that more people turn to their laptops and forego all the madness, malice and mayhem that accompanies Black Friday (and it's evil accomplice Brown Thursday) shopping and just buy their gifts online.

Because if you think about it, where else can you buy for your brother, his wife, their children & your parents while wearing your underwear and looking at Jennifer Lawrence naked at the same time WITHOUT going to jail?

Nowhere.

That’s the beauty of the internet.  Maybe if more people were informed of this incredible shopping experience, one day, by the grace of God, we’ll be able to make Black Friday and it’s sinister sibling Brown Thursday, urban legends we use to scare our kids into being good the entire year. Because if they’re not good, they’ll be thrown to the wolves of Friday…starting at 4 pm Thursday afternoon.