Those of us in the U.S. are wrapping up our work weeks today to spend tomorrow with friends and family, gathered around big home cooked meals and giving thanks.

Yes, I know that the history of this particular holiday is not nearly as charming as our children’s schoolbooks portray, but for many, the gathering isn’t about participating in a fabricated historical tale, but is about pausing in our hectic lives and honestly sincerely giving thanks for those things which make our lives sweeter throughout the year:  our friends,  our family, our community and our work to make world a better place.

Unfortunately, many people across the country leave their home Thanksgiving night to sleep in cold parking lots and line up at stores to participate in the consumer frenzy known as Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Retailers know that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the only weekday that many people will have off from work until Christmas, so they widely advertise rock bottom prices to lure people away from their friends and families to go shopping. Adbusters has declared November 27th in the U.S. and 28 November internationally Buy Nothing Day and calls upon us all to restrain from holiday shopping, or from any shopping as well as to unplug our TVs, leave the cars in the garage, and  “from sunrise through sunset, we’ll abstain en masse, not only from holiday shopping, but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.”

Last year’s Black Friday hit a new low.

Jdimytai Damour, a 34 year old man from Haiti, was working as a temporary worker at a Wal-Mart in New York State.  At 5:00 am, when the store was scheduled to open, the crowd of shoppers who had been waiting in line in the cold for up to 8 hours, stormed the door and trampled Jdimytai to death.

I think of Jdimytai with every advertisement that I’ve seen urging me to go shopping early on Friday morning. And I’ll be thinking of him as I instead linger around our dinner table, crowded with friends, and when I spend a welcome Friday off of work playing board games and making art projects with the kids and doing any number of things that will be infinitely more fun than sleeping in a cold parking lot to be first in line at the mall.

I hope you’ll do the same.

Happy Thanksgiving.