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All my life I have religiously celebrated the most important days on the American calendar. I am not just talking about obvious events like Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July, but even lower-profile occasions like Flag Day or Earth Day, or celebrations that lay outside my ethnic group’s traditions, like Cinco de Mayo.

Yet there is one banner day on the American calendar that I have always given a wide berth.

Black Friday.

Black Friday did not exist when I was growing up in the dreary 1950s. This was largely because there wasn’t enough merchandise to go around back then, and people didn’t like to work the day after Thanksgiving, and nothing ever went on sale except crummy old junk that retailers were desperate to unload.

The closest thing to Black Friday was the January White Sales, invented by the Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker in 1878. But in typical dull-as-dishwater Quaker City fashion, White Sales did not feature anything for kids—sheets? duvets? comforters?—so I never dreamed of attending one. White Sales were things my aunts went to. Usually at Wanamaker’s Department Store.

I do not remember anything like Black Friday existing in the swinging 1960s, but then again nobody who lived through the drug-addled decade remembers much of anything. They didn’t have official Black Friday sales during the cataleptic 1970s, because the economy was in woeful shape and the public had basically given up on the idea of bargains.

Black Friday sales seem to have come into existence in the 1980s, first as a novelty but then as a powerful tradition that has become deeply ingrained in the American psyche. People started lining up outside appliance outlets and department stores, risking life and limb to get their sweaty hands on one of the limited-quantity, only-while-supplies-last TVs, power tools, personal computers or designer camisoles. And then to trumpet their triumphs to everyone they knew.

All the while I stayed on the sidelines, not once showing up at Macy’s or Best Buy or the Apple Store. Why? Partly because I was exhausted from the tryptophan I had ingested with my turkey the day before and could not get out of bed. Partly because I hate and fear crowds, having once been knocked to the ground and trampled while lining up to buy tickets to see The Doors in 1968.

But mostly I have avoided Black Friday sales because I already have everything I want. I don’t need a new television. I don’t need a new laptop. My house is filled to overflowing with clothes I will never wear, books I will never read and pocket-size external hard drives I will never get around to formatting. I don’t need a new anything.

But one day a close friend upbraided me for shunning Black Friday, insisting that such antisocial tightfistedness was inherently un-American. She said that I was stingy and mean, an outcast at life’s rich feast. Or words to that effect.

I took this criticism to heart. The American economy is driven by consumer activity, and refusing to be a part of the biggest shopping day of the year smacks of elitism. Such misguided parsimoniousness, were it to spread throughout the land, could lead to economic disaster, a collapse on a par with Black Thursday in October 1929, when the stock market collapsed, taking the entire planet down with it.

I certainly don’t want to be responsible for anything like that. I don’t want to wind up with retail blood on my hands. So, this Friday, even though I don’t actually need anything, I’m going to hustle over to the mall to participate in the most beloved American ritual of all. I may only buy a tie. I may only buy a scarf.

But whatever I buy, I’m getting 30% off.

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