Black Friday

So, my experience with Black Friday was only when I went with my cousins down in Richfield, UT when we would go to Christensen's, Kmart, and Maurices. Since those days many years ago, I really have somewhat avoided Black Friday. We would go shopping with my mom the night before Thanksgiving to miss out on all of the crowds but still get some Christmas shopping done. What I did not know is that William is a HUGE fan of Black Friday. Fortunately, he's not "hard core" and getting up at 4 am or even midnight as some stores did this year, but he loves to go out and experience the hustle and bustle of the holidays, and especially to see all of the Christmas decorations. He feels that it helps to put him in the holiday spirit.

So, this year we went in the afternoon to the Great Mall. No, that's not a nickname- the real name of the mall is "The Great Mall". It's in Milpitas and it has TONS of stores. I'm not sure how many, but its quite massive. We thought that most of the crowds would have left by then, but we still drove around for 20 minutes before we finally found a parking space. Once inside, we walked around, shocked at some of the lines that would wrap around the stores- like the Aeropostale line or the Auntie Annie's pretzel line. It truly seemed like EVERY store (at least that we went into) had a line- EXCEPT Santa Claus. Yes, there was NO LINE for Santa. Poor guy was frantically yelling "ho,ho, ho" and waving to try to get our attention. What an irony that the only place without a line was for the one bringing the presents.

We- especially William- were sadly disappointed by the LACK of Christmas decorations at this mall. They did have a store with fiber optic christmas trees- which are SO cool, but unfortunately, even this experiences was tainted by one of the store workers following and hovering over us throughout the entire store. I hate it when workers do this- its fine to ask for help just once, but if I need help, I will come and find you. So annoying. Which is sad because these were truly Christmas trees for Silicon Valley nerds like my husband.

I proudly only bought myself a pair of earrings and the rest of the gifts were for others- so it was a moderately successful day. Oh, and William got his much desired pretzel dog after much hassle. We waited in line and got to the front only to hear that it would be another 10 minutes. So we walked to another where they were out, and a third where the line was SUPER long and not moving. We finally ended up going back to the first store where they finally had the pretzel dogs. Sadly, even the Great Mall did not finish all of my shopping, but it was amusing to walk around and see the massive amounts of people.