Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for November 27, 2022

I think it made the shopping safer to some extent. Since Black Friday started two weeks ago.

We have had similar discussions here in the past and I still perfer to heft the merchandise, to judge it’s worth for myself.

♪ It’s a nice day for a light sweater

♫ It’s a nice day for a CARDIGAAA-A-AN

I have not yet begun to shop!

Those who shop and run away, live to shop another day.

I will stay home for the HELLidays as much as I can.

We are all grown, even the kids. Instead of buying gifts I bake apple pies to give to my brother and sister.

Yeah, the sales of knee-spikes and elbow-gouges has really dropped off.

So now the comic has just resorted to stating the obvious?

Hot chocolate!

My wife & D-I-L dragged me out for “Black Friday” once – I went under protest, and shan’t go again.

Why under protest? Because a few years back, the peddlers of consumer-culture crap said "Shopping the day after Thanksgiving is an American Tradition – and idiots believed them. Why would anyone who was sane & sensible get up in the middle of the night to be elbowed by fools who think grabbing the last chunk of plastic junk off a shelf before some other fool does it is an accomplishment?

The only store I have been inside in the past two years with CVS, and that was to get my flu and Covid shots.

And other countries have black Friday sales, even if they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving! So strange to me.

I have not yet begun to have the money to shop. Full speed ahead and ignore the shopping carts.

We don’t go out for Black Friday in normal years, so certainly not doing so during the ongoing Covid problem.

I don’t shop for Christmas or birthdays, etc any longer. We don’t trade gifts with my family who are all adults (youngest nibling in in late 20s). He buys gifts for his two nieces – aged 12 and 20 – which are not appreciated (we are thought to be cheap) and for which not even a thank you is said as they toss them aside for lack of interest as SIL, their mom, has the thought in her head that she got 64 gifts every Christmas and they must each have same also. (She did not get same, I know her since she was a child.)

He will buy something for himself and give it to me to wrap and sneak under the tree late Christmas Eve. Many years I make a gift for him – latest was a small bear of each of us for him to use in my teddy village as he was always saying that he wished we could walk around the village.

I don’t get anything for Christmas, Chanukah (my holiday), our anniversary or my birthday – as my choice. Don’t need or want anything, why waste the money.

So that is the joke?? Shopping starts right after Thanksgiving? (Who knew?!? I told my loved ones I was opting out of holiday shopping forever, about 30 years ago. Don’t buy me anything and I won’t buy you a bunch of stuff you don’t need just because I feel obligated. But then, we don’t have kids.) And here I thought the joke had to do with his special sweater he took out of the drawer…..