Thanksgiving and Black Friday... working in retail.

Well, when you work in retail, the holiday season is a very very VERY busy time of year. I work for the General Manager at The Shoppes at River Crossing in Macon (Beautiful outdoor mall! Great Shopping! Seriously, I'm not being biased!), and when the holidays roll around, the retail world goes MAD! In a good way, but mad nonetheless. So when the work day gets crazier, extracurricular activities (blogging for example) kind of go by the wayside. Black Friday (and Saturday in the retail world) are 2 of the craziest days of the holiday season. And up until last year (the first holiday season I worked at a mall), I never set foot outside of the house (well, the neighborhood). Growing up, we spent the Friday after Thanksgiving decking the halls at my parents house. The Christmas music would be blaring, the front door wide open as we decorated the front porch, my sister singing at the top of her lungs, brothers dragging boxes down from the attic, Ma supervising, Pa stringing lights on the outside trees... ah, memories. But, as I mentioned in a previous post, times and traditions are a-changin'... and as our families have grown, our careers have changed.

I wish I had pictures from Thanksgiving break... but I did a Blogger no-no and forgot to bring my camera home for the holiday. I was lucky enough to get Wednesday off work, so Andrew and I headed to my parents house on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, I spent the entire day with my sister. We hung out and played with the pups, took a trip to Hobby Lobby, met lil' bro for lunch at Shannon's favorite restaurant- Las Palmas, braved Wal-Mart (madness!), and headed home to sew up some Christmas bandanas for our precious pups. That was my favorite time of the day... we were all in the kitchen. Ma was working on her adorable homemade advent calendars, Pa was baking his delicious cheesecake specialty, and Shan and I were sewing bandanas and acting a fool! It was a good time, folks! Wednesday night, Andrew came by to pick me up to go to his parents house. As I was loading up our bag in the trunk, a huge black truck came swinging into the cul-de-sac... the window rolled down and a sweet little voice said, "Excuse me..." Yes, there was more to that sentence but I can't remember what it was because I was too busy staring slack-jawed at my AUNT DI & UNCLE MARTY!!! They had the week off, and decided to just start heading South (from Cicero, New York) and see how far they got for Thanksgiving. What a surprise!

Soon after greeting our amazing surprise guests, Andrew and I headed to his parents house to load everyone up in the car and head out to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Andrew and I randomly watched Twilight earlier this year, then I decided I had to read the book because there was no way it could possibly be as bad as the movie (I was right- the book is waaaay better!)... which led to me reading all 4 books in less than a week, and then Andrew read them, and then his sister Anna and his mom read them, and then Mara read them. Now we are all fans and decided that we would wait until we were all together to go see New Moon. We had a GREAT time! Unfortunately, I was sitting next to Anna and therefore left with a bruised arm. She was sooooo into it. We enjoyed the rest of the night with his parents, and then did our typical Thanksgiving day... first half with his family, second half with mine. We had a great time, but Thanksgiving always leaves us wishing we had more time in the day to spend with each of our families.

We had to drive home Thanksgiving night, and made it back to Macon at about midnight. Andrew and the pups hung out in the living room for the night, and I got a few hours of sleep before waking up dark and early to get to work by 4:00am. We had a very successful day at the mall, which made the lack of sleep worth it; but by the time I got home at 6pm (all the while knowing I had to be back in the office at 7am on a Saturday!), I was DONE. Pooped. Exhausted. Andrew made my looooong day end on a perfect note when he sat me directly on the couch next to the warm fire, placed the warmed-up leftovers from my parents' house on the tray table and put on a movie. About 30 minutes after I got home, I snuggled up with the pups (see below) and passed out... after a couple of days with their Wilbur-Cuz, they were pooped, too! Andrew said they had been sleeping all day, and they ended up staying in the house and sleeping most of the weekend.