Happy Thanksgiving!
Plus, some keen holiday advice!
Hello to our subscribers, to our casual readers and listeners, and to our contributors! Happy Thanksgiving! From our family to yours, the Editor-in-Chief and I hope you've had a wonderful day - and will have a wonderful weekend! - of great food, fellowship, football, and whatever other traditions make holidays special for you! We want you to know we're thankful for you.
It's easy to say, but it's true: we know there's no shortage of online destinations for the kind of essays, short stories, and reviews. We appreciate your attention, and we aspire to deserve it. So, thank you so much, God of the Desert readers, listeners, and writers!
While I'm here, I may as well use my little platform for two kind-of-joking, kind-of-not Holiday Public Service Announcements:
1.) Please allow folks to be COVID-cautious in peace! COVID-19 is behaving differently in different parts of the country. And your friends and relatives may have pre-existing conditions that they don't care to share with you - anything from high blood pressure to a very early pregnancy, and all kinds of stuff in between. So please let people take the precautions they seem appropriate! Extra points of you do it without commentary. Extra pie if you shut down someone else's judgy commentary!
2.) Please do not take a power nap this evening so that you can go marauding about your city in the wee hours in a quest to save a few hundred bucks on a flat-screen! Gahhh. Black Friday is horrible! It's bad enough for people working at malls and Best Buys, but when those places open up crazy early the day after Thanksgiving, so do the cafés and restaurants nearby. Some of our lowest-paid and least-appreciated employees in the workforce are unable to take off the whole holiday weekend that most of us enjoy because people are out saving 30% on sheets, and they need lattes while they're doing it. It's crappy. It would be great to send a message to these companies that they should provide holiday pay for the day after Thanksgiving, too.
And if you must be out and about for Black Friday, then, for heaven's sake, please do not yell at the employees you encounter if they seem flustered, tired, or generally as if they'd rather be literally anywhere else. They are flustered. They are tired. And I bet some would happily trade opening the mall, the Old Navy, or, God forbid, the Walmart for a nice, extra-invasive colonoscopy.
Really. People are killed on Black Friday during episodes of mass shopping hysteria. Why not stay home, where it's warm? And, I mean, there's probably pie.
Happy Crazy Season, everybody!
Be gentle with yourselves,
Sally Shideler
Managing Editor, God of the Desert Books
Chief Editor-in-Chief Wrangler