Don't be a retail Schmuck. All year long! #thanksmas #blackfriday

The righteous remnant is already waving its mighty stick. "Keep stores closed on Thanksgiving!" the remnant cries, "Let those poor people be with their families!" They rail against the opening of stores on the holiest of holy day of Thanksmas. They stand in staunch opposition to it and advertise their vehemence all over the social media, and then a mere hours later they are Instagramming the heck out of the Black Friday mayhem. Because forcing a man to work for double overtime on Thursday night is radically different from forcing a man to work on Black Friday at a regular hourly wage?

I don't dedicate a whole lot of bandwidth to pondering whether or not we should open or close stores on certain days. What I do care a great deal about are fair wages, equal employment opportunities, consumer protections. Which is why, having worked plenty of retail (shout-out to Ann Taylor, Paper Source, the now-defunct Copley Flair to name a few), I'd like to speak to a few more values that transcend the Christmas retail blitz.

Here is some food-for-thought on the retail life all year long:

1. You are a VIP customer. Just like everybody else. Although the retail associates are trained to make you believe otherwise, exercise a little common courtesy, especially as the holidays approach. If your cashmere sweater cannot be found at Gap North, and the associate offers to call Gap West to see if it's in supply, this is a kind gesture, and exceedingly helpful since the retail associate probably knows the personnel at the other store. But if there are heaps of other customers waiting to be rung up, perhaps you can offer to let others go ahead of you. Or! Perhaps consider making the call yourself on your handy cordless calling device right there in your pocket!

2. Bob Barker is dead. Now it's your job to hand out hugs and prizes. Growing old is hard, y'all. Your sight goes, your memory goes, even your tastebuds start to fade. Let's be kind to our elder customers who may need a hand with a door, who might not be able to carry all their parcels, who might look confused as to where they parked the Buick in the parking lot. Bob Barker is no longer there to hug little old ladies and make their days with his tanned, pristine persona. So be a Bob Barker to your elders at the mall, even if it's not your paid job to do so, and maybe someday someone will be one to you.

3. There are freeways and then there are shoulders to the road. Even if stores are not clearly marked with passing lanes and exit ramps, there are places where the taking of a selfie or the sending of a text message are only acceptable if you are an aboriginal from the Australian Bush country who has never been inside a Target before. Otherwise, you are likely causing a shopping cart traffic jam or just being a total retail schmuck. So pull your cart off the main artery and into the pet food aisle or a dressing room and complete your e-gram.

4. Everyone gets a turn. I promise. If you stand in line without cutting anyone, eventually you will get to the front. But remember how many people were in front of you. All those folks? They may have had multiple returns/exchanges/coupon codes that expired with Poor Ol’ Lyndon B. Johnson. Exercise patience with the retail associates. They are probably fried and their throats are probably sore from speaking in a holiday happy octave and they are tired from standing, too. So be the change you want to see in the checkout at Macy’s. Do your mindfulness exercises or finally get around to following Ryan Reynolds on Twitter or check out the new Greetabls.

And you? What are your Retail Absolutes?

Vows not seen in the NYT

The only way to read the Sunday NYT is to dart right for the Sunday Styles section. Otherwise you are dead inside or you are illiterate, or possibly both. Maybe you take a quick scan of whether or not you know anyone in the "Vows" pages. (I never do.)(I was born in the Midwest.)(I think these parenthetical facts are related.) Maybe you snicker at the brazen journalist who capped off the profile on one couple-to-be-wed, "The groom's previous two marriages ended in divorce." What would the hashtag for that one be? #bestwishes #threesacharm These little profiles are always so unapologetically namedroppy and vomitus. Yet they are also a rare celebration of union, against the wails of the thousands who have lost loved ones in the Phillippines this week, against the din of celebrity break-ups of the hour.

But what if they told the real story, gave us the real scoop. Here's how ours would read:

Kendra Stanton, the daughter of a redheaded mother and a silver-haired father, was married on Sunday to John Lee, the son of Mija and Jae. None of the parents have amassed great fortunes due to their Ivy league educations, though if filing taxes on time made one a rock star, these people would be a bunch of Mick Jaggers. In fairness, Kendra's father is a lawyer but prefers to reference his glory days working the steampress at Schoolbells school uniform suppliers, when he was 18.

Ms. Stanton, 24, is a serial jobhopper who is not living up to her potential and is accruing credit card debt rapidly, probably because she keeps reinvesting her profits from her part-time retail job into her wardrobe since her full-time job working with at-risk youth is making her depressed about the state of humanity. It's better than eating her feelings, because, hello, wedding dress fitting in two days! She graduated magna cum laude from a small liberal arts college on a hill that is highly obscure. She no longer remembers her major. Her parents are no longer married. They have never taken her to Europe. She doesn't know it yet but she will not be taken off the waitlist at her top law school, so she won't go after all.

Mr. Lee, 26, is an anomaly: a male, Canadian-born Korean social worker who likes fashion, frisbee and football and loves Jesus. He might actually be the only one. Like, on earth. He earned his MSW from a college that happens to be all-women for undergraduate, which was not as much of a problem as one would imagine. In his own undergraduate years, he was not the most stunning student. He did swim all four years and has the wristwatch to prove it. His parents own a dental lab, which is a useful thing for a variety of reasons, particularly for making free mouthguards for future daughters-in-law who develop TMJ for unknown reasons.

What my children taught me about play

One of the four billion things I didn't know before I became a parent and which I needed my children to teach me is that they actually tell me who they are through their play. Loverpants has always said that children's first language is play. So I knew that, intellectually. But seeing how my children school me in the characters that they are forming and the needs that they are expressing is just...profoundly humbling. I hear my daughter talking in a nurturing voice to her brother and I hear the echoes of how I strive to talk to her. On my best days, I try to use that voice. And she tells me through her play that she has absorbed those moments and I give thanks. Then I hear my little man falling to pieces because he cannot find Buzz Lightyear and doesn't want to settle for Luella the American Girl doll. I know that he has seen me simmering (usually over nothing) and then suddenly bubbling over my pot in similarly graceless fashion.

I am also suddenly smacked by memories of my own girlhood and how hard it was for me to play as a child. At least not in the traditional sense, which, now I realize was my language of being a stressy kid. I had no time for frivolity. I would organize my room and all the drawers of my bureaus for hours. I loved playing school, but only if I could teach and lend order to my "classroom." Going over to the house of some girls whose mother was a single parent was totally stressful for me. Their mother babysat children by day and their house was unfathomably messy. I would fantasize about cleaning their house, wall to wall, scrubbing floors and clearing the Easy Cheese off the countertops of their kitchen. "So. What do you wanna do?" the girls would ask, and, I would always say, "Heyy, let's clean!" like it was the most normal activity. Like it was second only to styling Barbie dolls or riding bikes.

I see my daughter's little nooks and nests of activity, each sacred in its purpose, "This is my library, Mama. And why did you throw away that magazine?! That was for the waiting area to my beauty parlor." Even though the floor of her bedroom is a minefield of dolls and books and Legos (murder weapons to bare feet), I am glad to behold the mess because it means she feels free to play. She is not so anal-retentive about her space that she does not enjoy it. It is not work for her, right now, and that is what she is telling me through the Chernobyl of toy store aftermath on the carpet. At least, that is what I tell myself.

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Went to an Enchanted Maze the other day. Or, as Little Man said, "The Chanting Maze." There were no monks chanting, though that would have been equally awesome and contemplative. Just a lot of pumpkins and tractors and haybales. Our time there was pitch perfect.