On Black Friday, Sept. 24, 1869, the gold market collapsed, spurred by the chicanery of two disreputable financiers.
On Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, triggering the Great Depression.
On Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, the market collapsed again, with the Dow Jones plunging 508 points.
On Black Friday, Nov. 23, 2012 — after a day braving shoppers and shouters in San Francisco — my husband and I collapsed on the living room couch. And we didn’t even buy anything.
Once upon a time, I basked in the spirit of the holiday season: the scents, the tinsel, the songs, the sidewalk Santas. When I was a toddler in Manhattan, my grandfather and I would walk to Central Park West to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and a few weeks later, my mother would take me to Macy’s to visit Santa himself. Imagine my surprise when I saw Santa a few minutes later, standing on the corner with a big red kettle.
Even after I stopped believing, I marveled at the windows, the big tree at Rockefeller Center, the skaters below. Every Dec. 24, my father would take me to lunch in the city and we’d visit a five and ten, where I’d pick out ornaments for our tiny tree.
When my own children were young, I perpetuated the myths and the merriment. Many years later, after a divorce, I returned to Judaism. I gave up the tree and the ornaments. Christmas didn’t enter our home. I bought an Israeli chanukiah with a gift certificate I received from j. weekly colleagues at my adult bat mitzvah, and I made latkes and applesauce from scratch.
I still relished the sights, sounds and festivities of the Christmas season, singing in choirs, taking in “The Nutcracker” and “A Christmas Carol,” and baking brandied apricot teacakes to fill holiday baskets. If I didn’t have an invitation for Christmas dinner, I’d brood. Chinese food and movies were not part of the tradition I grew up with.
Neither was the nightmare before Christmas called Black Friday, which I experienced for the first time this year. On the corner of Market and Powell streets, a limber young man gyrated on a soapbox to the beat of a bongo while another, encased in a sandwich board, hollered about the power of Jesus, taking his bullhorn to warn of the dangers of hell.
Sartre said hell is other people. On Black Friday, hell was on Market Street. Standing in the cold outside Forever 21 while our teenage grandchildren waited in line with their gift certificates and purchases, I remembered the anticipation of holidays past. When did I grow old? When did I become jaded?
It isn’t the sugarplums that have left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s the orgy of “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth called it more than 200 years ago. It’s the crowds, the racks filled with things I neither want nor need, the specials that aren’t. Not so ironically, our Jewish forebears contributed to the commercial frenzy from which we now try to distance ourselves.
At the end of a day in San Francisco, we returned home with our grown children and the grandchildren. As the light faded, we walked through the garden. I pointed out the lone daffodil that sprang up out of season, the lingering cherry tomatoes of summer, the impatiens that defied the autumn chill. No, I am not inured to joy, but when my children asked whether we had registered our gift preferences on Amazon, I shook my head. Instead, I suggested that they contribute to Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.
No, I want nothing. I am thankful for what I have. Nor do I rue what I gave up. Nonetheless, I am grateful I have special plans for Christmas — singing to shut-ins at a nursing home.