One Democrat has found his solution:
A lawmaker in Ohio wants stores in the state to pay triple wages for employees who work on Thanksgiving, an effort that comes as Macy’s, the holiday’s quintessential retailer, is allowing its workers to choose whether to work that day.
Both are attempts to counter frustration among workers and their families over holiday store hours that have expanded into the holiday.
State Rep. Mike Foley, a Democrat from Cleveland, said his bill would allow employees to bow out of the holiday shift without job sanctions while protecting family time from excessive consumerism…
I absolutely loath the idea of working on a holiday. As a matter of principal, I’ll accept being fired before I’d ever work on Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving. My employer is currently closed on Christmas and asks for volunteers on Thanksgiving (and pays them triple time for doing it), while on Easter I’ve always managed to get a vacation day for it. Things like New Year’s Day, Fourth of July and such are a bit of a different animal – New Year’s Day off is only really important if you’re rather hung over from the night before, while the Fourth only gets rolling as the sun goes down. But the basic idea I hold is, still, that holidays are, well, holidays – and by and large everyone should be off. Other than crucial things such as hospitals, pharmacies and gas stations, everything else should be closed to the largest degree possible – some exceptions for vacation resorts, of course, because vacation resorts are designed, as it were, to care for people during holidays. But to have some retailer drag their people in on a holiday? Obscene. Stupid, too – you don’t actually increase your sales by doing that: you just move them from the day after the holiday to the day of.
I don’t like the idea of the government forcing businesses to close or pay massive increases in pay for holiday work but, goodness, corporations can be infuriatingly inhuman in their actions. I don’t know which nimrod in a boardroom first thought that being at work on a holiday would be a good idea, but I’d erect a statue in his memory, with “Idiot” on the name plate.
There is nothing wrong with working hard and trying to get ahead. Businesses do have to be profitable to survive – but there’s a time to work, and a time to not work. God is a little wiser than all of us, after all, and He did state that we should take a day of rest every week…not be open 24-7 in the hopes of squeezing out one more tenth of a percent of profit for the quarter. Let us, good people, be human – and let us therefore take a day off. Its not like its every week there’s a holiday – if the cash register isn’t ka-chinging merrily four or five days a year, it won’t kill anyone.
A happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
Blogs For Victory 
With the promise of impending violence in Ferguson, MO, hanging over our heads for the last 90 days, I wasn’t sure we were going to enjoy another Thanksgiving as a free nation. Thankfully it appears that my apprehension was misplaced. My heart goes out to the honest, law-abiding folks in Ferguson who have seen their livelihoods burned to the ground. I even pray for the souls of those who did the burning. I pray that someone or something comes along to drive the hate from the hearts of those who wake up every day embracing that hate.
My wife and I are doing something entirely different today. All our extended family that we normally celebrate Thanksgiving with are gone in separate directions this year, and we find ourselves alone for the first time in recent memory. For dinner this afternoon we’re heading back to a resort about an hour north of our house, a place where our two families vacationed together a couple times back in the late 50’s.
http://www.in.gov/dnr/parklake/inns/potawatomi/dining.html
Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and God bless America.
Looks like a quiet peaceful retreat. Have a great day with Mrs. Spook
It turned out to be a great experience, and, while much of the Inn is new, the old dining room is pretty much as I remember it from when we were kids. Great buffet with turkey, prime rib, mashed potatoes, stuffing and several kinds of vegetables plus a huge salad bar and dessert table. Fun time.
My husband and I once decided we didn’t want to host a big Thanksgiving dinner, as we usually did, so we went to Santa Fe for Thanksgiving. My best friend went with us and we loved the change from the traditional dinner. The hotel had a great Thanksgiving spread, but we were in different weather, in a very different kind of city, and the next night we were sitting on a balcony having a drink when they had a big ceremony to light the lights on the Plaza. It’s fun to do something different for a change.
We had a great family dinner this year, the first time my brother and sister in law hosted a dinner in their new house, and we put their huge kitchen to good use, with four women cooking and visiting—-it took me back to when I was a kid, and farm get-togethers with everyone chipping in. We have all had so much to be thankful for this year, it was a very meaningful time for all of us. This is my favorite holiday, in spite of the efforts to commercialize it. It has always been nothing but a time to reflect on blessings and give thanks, which has made it very special.
And my dog Lily was thankful that when I brought home a platter of dessert bars I left them on the kitchen counter when I went in to take a bath. I was happy with a hot Jaccuzi and a good book and she was happy working her way through lemon bars, raspberry bars, and half of the pecan bars. This morning I had to explain, at the office, that there was a perfectly good reason I didn’t bring many goodies.
Lily is really a goat in a dog suit.
I had 15, including myself, in today – from Great-Grandpa at 87 to great-grandson at not quite 2. It was a lot of fun – and everything came out splendidly as far as the food goes.
What restored a bit of my faith in America today was that kid singing the National Anthem before the Detroit-Bears game…
There is a bit of good news to be thankful for this holiday season. The price of light crude dropped below $70/barrel this morning for the first time in, well, in a long time. Not good news for U.S. oil companies invested in fracking in this country, but extremely bad news for Russia, which needs oil to be at around $100/barrel to balance their budget. Also bad news for many mideast regimes that hate us. Great news for Americans who use a car for transportation.