'Tis the season

With Halloween behind us, the holiday season is coming at us full force. It means two months of sappy holidays and 25 days of even sappier TV movies. My saving grace this holiday season, as always, is Black Friday. And with the extension of Black Friday into Thanksgiving, I now have two days to be thankful this year.

Thanksgiving starts off well with another Cowboys loss. My cousins and I then head over to Sports Authority to get free lawn chairs. They’re the sort of chairs your parents brought to your little league soccer games, but I’m the youngest in my family and no longer eligible for little league soccer, so they’ll just sit in the garage next to the chairs from last year. The only action they see is the occasional bump when we pull the car in too close to the garage wall.

The chairs are just an added bonus though. The real draw at Sports Authority is the cash cards, which are scratch-offs worth at least $10. It’s like the lottery, but you don’t have to pay and you’re guaranteed to win. I walk out of the store, put my hood on, take my glasses off and get back in line to get another. After a few more go-arounds, I have upwards of $100 in cash cards. I text my friends at the Sports Authority across the river in Maryland to let them know the good news. The options seem endless, but the cash cards expire at midnight so I have to use them now. I go through the sections: shoes, clothes and racquets—I settle for socks for the third straight year.

My cousins and I return home for a quick dinner before heading over to Walmart. The line is hundreds of people long—we should have skipped dinner. I get in line at the video game section behind a woman who’s given up her Thanksgiving to get a copy of Madden for her son for Christmas. An hour later they unlock the cases, everyone rushes them and the police are called. As I watch the Walmart employees run from the crowd, I see the woman in front get pushed away from the cases. I reach over her and everyone else to grab six copies of FIFA and, feeling the holiday spirit, a copy of Madden. It’s not for her—she convinced me that for just $27 I needed one, and now I have one.

I walk over to Best Buy to meet up with my father. The woman from Walmart lines up a few people behind us and tells me that she was unable to get a copy of Madden for her son. I tell her that sucks and go back to paging through the Best Buy ad. There are people trying to scalp tickets for the doorbusters—I tell them to leave me alone. We’re finally let into the store and I push my way to the back where the Xbox Live cards are. It’s only $8 for a 3-month subscription so I grab the whole rack, 16 cards in all. I can’t imagine a day when I won’t want an Xbox Live subscription, and yet it’s years later and I still have a dozen Xbox Live cards.

I head back to Maryland and meet up with some friends to hang out for a couple hours before heading over to Target. We run into a classmate from Hebrew School (Jewish Sunday School) in line—go figure. We aren’t looking for anything in particular at Target, but it’s 4 a.m. and we have nothing else to do. Once we’re in, I decide to buy a new iPhone. When I get to the front of the line, I ask for silver. Thirty minutes later, I’m presented with my new iPhone—it’s gold. I tell them to give me a silver iPhone and they say they can’t—I can’t even. I tell them I’ll keep the gold iPhone and report the charge as fraudulent if they don’t give me a silver iPhone. The cashier goes to talk to a manager and I go to the speaker section where I play the sample music on every speaker on max volume. They come over and agree to give me a silver iPhone and I leave with my new silver iPhone thirty minutes later.

The best nights end where they start. We head back over to Sports Authority for their 5 a.m. reopening and get in line. I walk across the parking lot to Old Navy to grab some flip flops for a dollar. After 30 minutes of waiting, our families arrive and cut the line to join us. There are 12 of us and only 80 cash cards. This means that this year we have a 15 percent chance of getting the $500 cash card. When we finally get in, we get our cards and reach into our pockets for coins to scratch them off with—we all get $10. We walk around for about an hour, again unsure of what to get—I settle for socks.

Justin Koritzinsky is a Trinity junior. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.