Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Season of Mandatory Niceness (Also Known as Black Friday Through Christmas)

Thanksgiving is officially done. The leftovers are crammed into the fridge like guilty secrets, and the last of the pumpkin pie has been scraped up by someone who swore they were “done eating” two hours earlier. Which means only one thing: Black Friday is upon us—the sacred national ritual where millions of people who were just giving thanks for what they already have stampede into retail stores to violently acquire things they absolutely do not need.

Black Friday used to be the Super Bowl for retailers. It was their shining moment—their day of joy, their profit-fueled Christmas morning. But now? Now it’s a grim parade of exhausted workers, unhinged bargain hunters, and corporate emails screaming “EXTENDED! FINAL! LAST CHANCE! BUY NOW YOU UNGRATEFUL WRETCH!” until mid-December. It’s like the holiday season looked at consumerism and said, “Yes, but make it feral.”

And here we are entering what I affectionately call Lent for Assholes—that magical four-week period where everyone pretends to be a decent human being, mainly because society tells them they’re supposed to. Suddenly the folks who spend the other eleven months cutting people off in traffic and berating baristas for incorrect foam texture are out here holding doors, adopting smiles that crack like dry paint, and tossing spare change into charity buckets so loudly you’d think they were ringing a dinner bell.

Then there’s the Bible-toting crowd—the ones who proudly carry a copy of scripture as pristine and untouched as the day they lifted it from Grandma’s end table. They would never dream of opening it (too many words, not enough memes), but by golly, they will weaponize its moral authority for exactly four weeks. ’Tis the season, after all, to be kind. Or at least to look like it. Or at least to look like you think other people think you’re trying.

For one month, the world collectively agrees to stop being a dick. Not permanently—let’s not get wild. Just long enough to grab some peppermint lattes, post a few self-congratulatory “blessed” photos, and pretend that all the performative niceties somehow counterbalance the dumpster fire of the entire preceding year.

And then—miraculously, predictably—come December 26th, the spell breaks. The halo slides off. The same people who were “so grateful and full of love” go back to honking at pedestrians like they’re playing Whac-A-Mole with their car.

So yes, Thanksgiving is over. Black Friday is here. And welcome, one and all, to the holiest time of the year: Lent for Assholes, where kindness is compulsory, generosity is seasonal, and humanity manages—however briefly—to rise a few inches above its default setting of “mildly feral.”

Enjoy it while it lasts. The timer’s already ticking.