BLACK FRIDAY

If you made it through Thanksgiving with nothing more serious than some indigestion, congratulate yourself on sprinting the hurdle to Black Friday. Even if you didn't wait outside a big box store in the pre-dawn darkness wrapped in a blanket, teeth chattering like a popsicle in the sub-freezing temperature, your trip back into a department store in the coming weeks is inevitable.

When you do stroll, or drag your heels, into a store, take pause and check yourself - and your manners. Bravo tv reality star Bethenny Frankel coined the phrase 'check yourself before you wreck yourself'. Cute and flip as it was, it is spot-on for the holiday season, aka the season of rudeness. We can all sand down the roughness the retail holiday season will bring. Before you swoop down on a newly-hired seasonal worker with an air raid of questions and requests, remember that your clerk is not an air traffic controller. Their abilities to serve you will be limited.

Nor are they wizards able to speed the passage of time. Patience really will be a virtue. As should decorum. Wait out the long lines with composure and courtesy. Resist the temptation to channel Scrooge and become agitated! The first shopping day of the Christmas season needn't be black and blue. But it, and every other day of the year, should be cordial, thoughtful and respectful...because it DOES Manner A Lot!