Holiday Shopping Frenzy

I’m talking holidays here, not sports. Today begins the third day of our Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend — the second of our nine three-day weekends in 2016. Like this one, most include a Monday, but a couple involve Fridays and, since the Thanksgiving holiday actually begins on Thursday, I think it might be considered a four-day-weekend.

If the commercials on TV are to be believed (which I do not advise), most of these three- (or four-) dayers are not really holidays at all. They are marketing opportunities and, for tens of thousands of people, involve shopping extravaganzas. Some even involve specially named days – ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ come to mind. For sure, we are a culture that puts the almighty dollar above all else.

Roman Forum – Ancient Shopping Mall

When I was taking “Western Civ” at Stanford (back in my salad days when things were a lot simpler and a year’s tuition was a shocking $660) we were all pretty amazed at the number of holidays there were in Ancient Rome. That and the number of prostitutes. Both were amazingly high numbers, though I don’t remember either one, specifically. I doubt that our present-day numbers are yet competitive, holiday-wise. I’m not sure about the other statistics.  Back in the 1950s, my classmates and I definitely considered Ancient Rome ‘decadent’ and  felt there had been good reason for its fall.

Nyel, Puttering

I wonder if the Romans spent their holidays at the forums and markets as they called their shopping malls. For sure, some holidays were devoted to religious pilgrimages to temples or shrines. And some were spent at sporting events at amphitheaters such as the Coliseum or at raceways such as the Circus Maximus. Well… come to think of it, some things haven’t changed much in the past 2,000 years.

Nyel and I have spent this three-dayer puttering. Right here at home. I wonder if the Romans did that, as well.