Day 460 - Gettin' A Little Crazy

I'm just going to preface this by saying that Black Friday is a tradition in my family.  My mom, my sisters and I go out every year, do a little shopping in the early morning hours, eat lunch, and come home and crash.

But this year, my sister Erin and I did something completely silly, just for $hits and giggles.

Midnight Madness, anyone?

You see, the local outlet mall holds Midnight Madness every Thanksgiving / Black Friday, where all of the stores and the food court all open at midnight.  They offer all kinds of deals and make a big fuss over it because everybody - well, until this year, except us - goes to the Aurora outlets for Midnight Madness.  This year, since the economy has been bad and people around here don't have any money, stores were practically giving things away this year, with some stores opening at ten or eleven instead of waiting until the magic hour to unlock their doors.

So, out of curiosity, Erin and I went to Midnight Madness.  However, we decided, or rather Erin decided and I agreed, that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it up right.  We decided that we were going to be the first in line at the COACH outlet when they opened at eleven.  Why?  Because out of all of the stores in the three outlet sub-malls, COACH was by far our favorite and the store that everyone and their brother and sister were going to be waiting at.

We left our house at seven on Thursday evening.  Yes, I said seven in the evening.

Erin and I got to the outlet mall around 7:30 and found a prime parking spot.  In reality, any parking spot at the Farms sub-outlet is prime parking because, well, there aren't many parking spots to begin with.  To our dismay, there were already about twenty people in line already!  Did these people bring Thanksgiving dinner in a crock pot or did they just leave the dirty dishes on the table and run?

Disappointed, Erin and I got in line, pulled out our Blackberries, and prepared to stand in line for the next three and a half hours. 

We weren't even sure if we were going to buy anything.  Heck, we were both broke.  But we had heard friends, coworkers, and sorority sisters go on about Midnight Madness for years, and if Erin and I spent summers of our tween years standing in line for hours in the blistering summer sun waiting to get the newest Beanie Babies on the day they were released, we could handle three and a half hours of standing under an awning and watching the ran pour down on the poor souls who didn't leave the house until after eight.  Piece of cake!

Midnight Madness was fun, but it was more for our bonding time than to actually go shopping.  We stood behind a pilgrim woman at COACH for three and a half hours, watched as an Asian international student tried to cut in line and then proceeded to pick a fight with the woman in line behind us, set foot in the Osh Kosh Bgosh store to say hi to a friend and then ran away, and laughed as Erin blindly jumped into a massive puddle as we were running through the rain back to my car at one in the morning.  I wish I would have gotten a picture of the pilgrim woman, whose family traditionally dresses up as pilgrims and Native Americans for their Thanksgiving get together.  She also said that she had gone to the movies in the outfit before arriving at the store.  Strange!

After Erin and I drove around Ravenna looking for some place that was serving food (and couldn't find any, ) we got home around two.  I started to panic because I couldn't find my cell phone, ransacked my car and found my phone under the passenger's seat, and went to bed.  We were pooped.

Then we got up at six and went out shopping again.  By the time lunch came around, I was so hungry and had such low blood sugar that I couldn't text anyone because my hands were shaking so bad.  Hey, the last time I had eaten anything substantial was for Thanksgiving dinner!

All in all, I had fun.  I didn't spend too much (thankfully, because another round of student loan payments are coming up) and I got to spend time with my family, which almost always makes me feel better.

-AA