Call me crazy. Call me weird.  Call me anti-capitalist. Call me whatever you like, but I see no sense in Black Friday shopping.

Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate a good deal as much as the next girl. But there are about ten thousand things I’d rather do than get up at midnight to wait in line with hundreds of other crazy people, just to get a good deal on stuff that you didn’t know you needed until you actually saw them displayed on the 50% off shelves. Two, I’ve spent the past three months working my tail off, and I just spent the day before stuffing myself to the gills with delicious food. Duh I’m going to sleep in.

Those are only two reasons, I know, but neither of us has all night.

My friend Maya had one Black Friday shopping experience that has most likely scarred her for the rest of her life. She was waiting in line at a toy store for a good deal on something that her son desperately wanted for Christmas. Her son was five years old at the time, so he was safely tucked in bed at home while his brave mother was out at some ungodly hour bumping elbows with a bunch of other bemittened mothers with smiles on their faces but competitive gleams in their eyes. They were as sweet as syrup before the shop’s doors opened, but once the bars went up, the entire host of the demons of Sheol inhabited these women. Spitting, biting, swearing, and bellowing vows of vengeance, the women descended upon the shelves of toys like starved hyenas.

Maya would not be a party to such behavior, so she walked away from the conflict empty-handed. But she had learned her lesson—a lesson which I have learned vicariously through her experience: Black Friday shopping is a bad idea.

The extent of our Black Friday shopping this year went as follows:

Me (still in my pajamas at 10:30 a.m., reading the Macy’s ad): “Oh, look, 60% off all attractive men wearing cashmere sweaters.”

Marcia (also in pajamas, on the phone): “I think they’re only selling the cashmere sweaters, hun.”

Me: “Oh, really? Hm. Pity.”

And that’s as far as it went. We value our sanity too much to go out amidst the teaming hordes in pursuit of purchasing things that, in the end, we don’t really need.