Counting Down to the Holiday

Traveling is getting tighter as Thanksgiving approaches. I was on a couple of freeways in Chicago this evening, and everything was moving much more smoothly than I'd have ever expected. I was going in to town, though, and traffic seemed fairly backed up going the other way.

I don't know whether I'll be caught in traffic or not, but posting for the next couple of days will probably be pretty light. Come on, it's a holiday--find your own fun! (Although now that I think about it, posting has been fairly light all the way around, lately--usually not more than one post a day. I'll still be providing at least that much.)

Enjoy your holiday tomorrow, with family, with friends, or on your own. We're intending to have an awfully low-key celebration, neither traveling nor hosting travelers. But on Friday (or Saturday outside of North America), don't forget not to buy anything. Once again, it's Buy Nothing Day, promoted, as always, by Adbusters (sponsored by Adbusters just sounds wrong, somehow). Remind the corporate commercial interests that we don't actually need to shop no matter what they might try to convince us of. And the stakes are a bit higher this year than they have been in the past, as we're reminded on the Buy Nothing Day Web site:

2006 will go down as the year in which mainstream dialogue about global warming finally reached its critical mass. What better way to bring the Year of Global Warming to a close than to point in the direction of real alternatives to the unbridled consumption that has created this quagmire?

Take a look at the 2006 press release for more information. (Although, it never hurts to recognize hype no matter which side it's on. The day after Thanksgiving is generally not the highest-earning shopping day of the year; that day is usually just before Christmas. There are no reliable statistics for shoppers who only browse, however, so I guess we can't say that the day after Thanksgiving doesn't have the most people jamming into the stores.)