After a lovely thanksgiving meal with Dan and his family yesterday, today was planned to be quite a lazy day… until I realized it was black Friday. Now, Black Friday is, I suppose, the equivalent to the January sales in the UK. It is quite common for people to camp out over night and get tickets for the “door busters” which basically means if you are first in line you can get the best deals. I know I am an early riser but there is no way I am camping outside overnight to get there for when the doors open at 4am. At 9am however I was more than willing to trample over anyone who was in my way. I managed to buy Sarah an early Christmas present that she is in desperate need for. Her laptop is quite old and recently not been charging or indeed wanting to stay on for large periods of time. I managed to get her a laptop for $450 where it would have cost about $700. Bargain! The rest of the day was spent getting her online and fart-arsing around with the bloody WiFi Router.
In the evening there is a tradition among the people of Indiana of the lighting of the tree ceremony. Technically it’s not a tree but rather the lights on the monument in the centre of Indianapolis. This is quite a big deal as there were around 15,000 people there all watching the singing and dancing. It was a father son thing this year as Katie was being a “moaning mini” which is never a good thing when you are in public. Sarah stopped home with her whilst Zack and I went to the event. We got there around 4.30pm and parked at the same place as I park for work using the existing parking permit (that saved $10). We had a little wonder around and ate at the mall watching time go by, rather than standing in the crowd freezing our arses off.
Around 6:15pm we decide to make a move. We got to monument square and walked gently around the monument looking at the stalls of food, gifts and television crews. We finally made our way to the front where there was a young girl singing Christmas songs. She was pretty good considering it was so cold. Zack and I leant up against one of the shop windows to get a fairly good view. More and more people arrive and it soon gets quite packed at the front of the stage where we were.
“I can’t see” come a little voice from my side. Bearing in mind Zack has a phobia of sitting on my shoulders; he did quite well to sit up on them for a fair few minutes. I guess this was mainly due to me leaning against the shop window rather than free standing. All was good until a tall bloke with a cowboy hat stands right in front of us. Great! Let s move a little bit across. You need to understand that is was absolutely packed out at this point and that we were crammed in there so much I couldn’t actually see my feet. “Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Daddy. I want to get down I don’t like it” says the voice from my shoulders. “I can’t put you down Zack there is nowhere to go.” I say. “I want to come down now. I’m really scared of falling.” “Well I’m scared of losing you in the crowd or you getting crushed, so you need to stay up there” I say quite firmly. It must have fell on deaf ears because Zack decides he would try his hand at crowd surfing. He gets a foot hold on my shoulder and makes a leap for it. “WHOA… WHAT YOU DOING?”I yell as he gently sinks into the crowd. I firmly grip on to the hood of his coat making sure I don’t lose him. After the initial shock of the jump I soon realize that this boy has quite a skill. He had a good sense of direction and was making better headway through the crowd than quite a few other people. Most of the crowed parted like the red sea as he made his way thorough, and with the rest of the people he would gently touch the middle of their back and they would see him and get out of the way… all the time dragging me behind him. There were a few instances of him touching in appropriately, them turning around giving me daggers then realizing it was him and cutely smiling at him. This boy has a gift. Whenever I have “accidently” touched anyone trying to get through a crowd I would get a slap! I can’t until he is at drinking age as he will be able to get to the bar first and get the round in.
At the end of this we didn’t actually see the lights go on, as he was too tired and wanted to go home. Sarah recorded it on TV and both Zack and I watched it with Sarah having a marathon of “there we are” on every wide angle shot of the crowed there was.
No comments:
Post a Comment