Each year on the fourth Thursday of November, millions of Americans travel around the country to be with their families for the special occasion of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has consistently been known as a holiday for spending valuable time with your family. There has always been the tradition of watching football in the living room while eating turkey covered in gravy and cranberry sauce with your family.

For me, Thanksgiving is a much more special holiday than normal because I don’t celebrate holidays which unite a majority of American families, such as Easter or Christmas. Thanksgiving annually unifies my family and brings members of my family in from faraway places such as Long Island or Houston. Yet, with an increasingly commercialized society, the rise of Black Friday has started to cause the fade the traditional family values of Thanksgiving. I have felt the experience of Black Friday cutting into family values firsthand.

For what seems like a consistent routine now for the past couple of years, I have had relatives leave our traditional Thanksgiving festivities early in order to stand in line for hours with hundreds of other strangers and practically fight with them over deals on items which aren’t even necessities. Black Friday brings out the worst in people every year. There have been hundreds of cases of people who have been injured and even killed by being trampled or fighting with other shoppers over goods on sale.

I may be a little biased because personally, I do not enjoy shopping and do not participate in the Black Friday craze. Even so, most people would find it appalling that two people in Arkansas would get into a fist fight over a two dollar waffle maker or that two people would be shot and killed in a California checkout line argument. Cases like these are only a select few out of the hundreds of incidents that occur during the annual Black Friday frenzy. Black Friday has a tendency to bring out a certain crazy in people, and leave them to forget the family values that should be the focus on this holiday.

My one hope for the future is that people will realize the importance of valuable family time, a key part of Thanksgiving. Shopping for half priced goods in a super store can wait. What can’t wait, however, is the treasured family time lost scavenging in stores in order to save an extra dollar on useless goods. My piece of advice for everyone is that this year when you are sitting with your family around the Thanksgiving table, take a moment to cherish the time spent with your family, no matter how brief. Be thankful for all of the good times you have spent with your family because those are some of the moments which are most valuable in your life