I do not care for giving the day after Thanksgiving such a downbeat name as Black Friday. I think Black Friday would be more appropriate in October at Halloween.

The first time I heard the phrase, I thought a disaster of major proportions occurred on that day in the past—for example, an extinction-level volcanic eruption such as Krakatoa or a stock market crash. A salesclerk patiently explained to the clueless that it was just the opposite of disaster: merchants coined the name because it is the biggest sales day of the year for them and is so lucrative it is the day that puts retail stores “in the black” [ink, that is]. Charming. Maybe it’s just me, but Thanksgiving and Black Friday are like oil and water. On the fourth Thursday in November, we gather our families together to be cheerful and thankful for our blessings, and then the day afterward is (gasp) Black Friday when many of us shop till we drop. Occasionally, some shoppers literally drop other shoppers who stand between them and one of a store’s few door-buster sales items. Perhaps Feeding Frenzy Friday would be a more descriptive name than Black Friday.

I’ve been shopping online for the past several years. The phrase Cyber Monday sounds more upbeat and benign than Black Friday, doesn’t it? It’s much more convenient and less of a hassle to go from one website to another than it is to drive from one brick and mortar store to another and hunt for non-existent parking spaces before one even gets to shop at all. When I shop online, I don’t have to camp out the night before in front of a store in the November frigid cold. I can shop when I choose on my computer, and I can shop in my pajamas while savoring a cup of hot chocolate with mini marshmallows. No one ever tackles me or tries to rip a bargain from my grasp while I’m shopping on my computer in my pajamas while savoring a cup of hot chocolate with mini marshmallows.

I’m a grandparent now. I take time out from being a Christmas Curmudgeon to enjoy going with my grandchildren and their parents to the children’s Christmas Eve mass, and I enjoy giving gifts to my grandchildren at Christmas and seeing their faces light up as mine once did at their ages. Those things are still meaningful and fun for me.

In addition to buying gifts for my grandchildren and close friends, I choose a tag each year from my church’s Christmas Giving Tree to provide a gift for an anonymous person, child or family in need. It rekindles my Christmas spirit, and it just plain makes me feel good to make a deserving person’s Christmas a bit merrier.

I no longer write a Christmas newsletter to send to everyone I know. [They’re probably grateful for that and who can blame them. Seriously.] I don’t mail out Christmas cards anymore. I send electronic Christmas greeting cards nowadays. They’re different, I like them, and my friends and family members say they are fun to receive. [The US Postal Service is undoubtedly unhappy about that. Well, they’re the ones who keep raising the price of stamps.]

Macho Guy used to be a Christmas decorating fanatic. Since he and I now spend our Christmases with our sons and their families in their homes, the Christmas decorations around here have been toned down considerably. We don’t hang wreaths. We don’t hang stockings. We don’t hang Christmas lights from the eaves. Our only decoration right now is a small artificial tree that we have on display in the living room. For years, we took that tree down from the attic, put it together, decorated it, and then reversed gears after Christmas. Finally, we decided to leave it decorated, cover it with a sheet, store it under the stairway to the lower level, and take it out each year in December. All we need to do is uncover it, put the Angel on top, and we’re done decorating. Spending Christmas with the kids and grandkids at their homes comes with an added bonus. Our grown children and their spouses do all the work. Macho Guy and I just show up with gifts and great big smiles on our faces and play with our grandchildren.

My Christmas season is fairly low key. However, I do make a few exceptions. For the past few years, I’ve been having fun on my computer counting down the days to Christmas with Jacquie Lawson’s animated advent calendar. Every December before Christmas, Macho Guy and I go with friends to quaint little Frankenmuth, Michigan for dinner, a bit of Christmas shopping in the quaint little shops, and to enjoy all the fabulous outdoor Christmas decorations and Christmas lights there. We attend several Christmas parties annually and make merry. We attend Christmas mass to hear again the Good News of Christ’s birth and take in the beauty of the almost-large-as-life manger on the altar. I watch my parents’ favorite uplifting Christmas movies every year without fail: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on 34^th Street (the 1947 classic version), and Scrooge (the 1951 British version of A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim—the best Scrooge ever). Viewing those films takes me back to the Christmases of my childhood. I confess that Scrooge is my favorite guilty Christmas pleasure. It never fails to bring me to tears.

Oh, dear. I just reread what I’ve written and I am amazed to realize that I am not the complete Christmas Curmudgeon I believed myself to be. It appears that I do not entirely dislike the Christmas season. I have found different ways to enjoy it in the present than the ways I enjoyed it in the past. I am not a curmudgeonly Scroogette after all—but you never heard that from me. I have a certain image to protect.

Not me. I was born without the shop-till-you-drop gene. I often wonder if that reflects on my femininity somehow.

I only shop when it becomes so absolutely necessary that I can no longer avoid doing so. Case in point: Macho Guy’s $100 challenge.

A number of years ago, when Firstborn and Little Brother were still school age, a T-shirt and jeans—sweatshirt and jeans in cold weather—were my eminently practical uniform of the weekday, and I had a few Sunday-Go-To-Meeting Outfits that I cycled through. One day, which happened to be the first day of the month, Macho Guy handed me a one-hundred-dollar bill.

ME: [eyes wide as dinner plates] What’s this for?

MACHO GUY: I want you to buy some new clothes. I’m tired of seeing you wear the same old stuff all the time.

ME: What’s wrong with wearing jeans and T-shirts? I’m raising two boys. You know what they’re like. I’d be crazy to wear good clothes around them.

MACHO GUY: It’s the good clothes I’m talking about. Look, I appreciate that you don’t spend a lot on yourself, but you need to get something new.

ME: But I don’t need anything new.

MACHO GUY: Yeah, you do. Let me put it this way. If you don’t spend this hundred on some new clothes by the end of the month, I’ll take back the hundred and I’ll take all your clothes out back and burn them and you’ll have nothing to wear.

ME: You wouldn’t dare.

MACHO GUY: Try me.

[Flash forward one month.]

MACHO GUY: Did you spend the hundred yet?

ME: No. Why?

MACHO GUY: Today’s the last day of the month. You’d better get your butt to the mall or tomorrow you’ll be a nudist.

He had that really macho don’t-mess-with-me look in his eyes that told me he meant business. I decided it was not in my best interest to mess with him. I took my butt to the mall.

My timing could not have been worse. I arrived to find a mall-wide sale going on. O joy. The place was a credit-card-flashing zoo, just the sort of bargain-manic mob I wanted to avoid. I shopped in haste, spending the hundred bucks on coordinated pieces I could mix and match to create several outfits, and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I figured my new duds would definitely placate Macho Guy, and I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to shop again for what I hoped was a long, long while.

The fact is that I don’t understand the appeal of shopping. I can’t work up any enthusiasm for it. I’d rather do just about anything else.

Grand openings don’t entice me. Sales leave me cold. Black Friday is just another day.

I do make an exception for books. I love to shop for books. I can spend countless hours browsing in a bookstore, and I have. Bookstores for me are equivalent to Godiva chocolate boutiques.

For some unknown reason, clothes shopping doesn’t do it for me. No one will ever refer to me as a clotheshorse. Of course, it doesn’t help that current fashion trends lean toward the coyote ugly. I open women’s magazines—MORE, for example—to see fashion editors gushing over the latest trends. Are they serious? Are they that easy to please? Are they color blind?

More often than not, the latest trends embrace unflattering and uninspired designs featuring discordant fabric patterns in clashing colors too bright or too sickly drab. One look at them and I put off shopping—dieting too. Call me a fashion curmudgeon if you will, but I refuse to starve myself to fit into an outfit that appears to be stitched together with fabric scraps from a ragbag.

I don’t even bother shopping for cute shoes. I can’t buy them. Shoe manufacturers decreed that I am not allowed to wear cute shoes because I have wide feet. I have very wide feet. I have the widest wide feet, actually—doublewide to be exact.

Easy Spirit shoe stores used to be the place to shop if you had very narrow or very wide feet. That was Easy Sprit’s claim to fame. I used to be able to find attractive shoes there in various colors in my size and width. Not anymore. The Easy Spirit honchos decided, in their finite wisdom, to manufacture doublewide shoes in black only. Wide feet are not allowed to wear colorful shoes. Wide feet are a serious inconvenience to shoe manufacturers and do not deserve colorful shoes. Wide feet must wear black shoes and look as if they are perpetually in mourning. As a consequence, I wear a lot of black outfits so the rest of me also looks as if perpetually in mourning—or like a New Yorker.

I’m not much for jewelry shopping either. Expensive jewelry has never been a turn-on for me. I’d rather wear inexpensive fun pieces or no jewelry at all, except for my wedding ring, which thrills Macho Guy no end. He’s the envy of several buddies whose wives keep various jewelry stores in business.

Unfortunately for non-shoppers like me, we are fast approaching the stress-filled holiday gift-shopping season. Soon it will be November and there comes Black Friday, the shoppers’ and retailers’ high holy day. As I mentioned earlier, Black Friday is just another day to me. You won’t find me camping in the middle of the night outside a store that advertises the sale of a limited number of Christmas specials—first come, first serve—when its doors open before dawn. I’ll be at home all Thursday night and Black Friday morning, warm and toasty in my bed, and visions of sugarplums will not be dancing in my head.