Hey, Santa's Elbowing Out the Turkey! Cry Fowl!

First, let me make it perfectly clear that I have, in the past, been a Black Friday shopper.  In fact, I regarded it not so much as a Christmas chore, but as a major annual sporting event.  I have been seen in the pre-dawn police-guarded line waiting to get into Walmart to nab an obscenely cheap TV.  I have experienced total shopping cart gridlock inside a Toys R Us.  I've wandered aimlessly through the mall no longer clear on which relatives I was still shopping for.  I have known the thrill of capturing the parking space right next to the door and I have entertained thoughts of curling up for a nap in a department store fitting room.  Happiness is both starting and finishing your Christmas shopping in one day.  It's very much like running a marathon… a very crowded marathon.  I've done Black Friday and I totally get it.
 Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is the day we hang back with our families and eat ourselves to the border of sick.  That's just us.  For other folks, Thanksgiving is a day to volunteer at a soup kitchen.  For others it's a football marathon in which no body moves from the sofa.  Some more ambitious sporting types might venture to the yard for an actual game of football.  It's a day for parades, turkey, and endless pile of pots and pans to scrub, and a night of crawling through traffic for those who went over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house.  No matter what a family's situation or choice of activity, or whether they choose None of the Above, Thanksgiving is a day when even Sears employees are entitled to celebrate the national holiday as they feel fit.  
Black Friday may be the Holy Grail of business days and I respect that, but Thanksgiving is still a national holiday.  Santa should not be elbowing out the Turkey.  While it is a shopper's choice to skip the feast, opening the shopping frenzy on Thanksgiving takes the holiday away from the people who work the sales floors of America.  My own teenager works for a major electronics chain, and if she had been assigned to work it would mean the whole family would have to forego the annual trek to the family feast.  When a store opens on Thanksgiving, someone's mother won't be there to cook the turkey.  Someone's father won't be playing touch football.  One extra day will not increase the amount of green headed for our nation's economic coffers this Christmas season, but it will cancel an opportunity for families to be families.  Black Friday is an important event, but so is Thanksgiving.  Let's keep them both, just not at the same time.