The Stories of This Jones Family: Shopping at 5:00 am

Some people would call us crazy, others just laugh. Each year on black Friday, we get up nice and early to go hit the crowds for our holiday shopping. The alarm clocks goes off at 3:00 am and by 4:00 we are waiting at the store for the big countdown to 5:00 am when all the packaging starts coming off and we can start grabbing. This year, it was a little interesting getting there as it had snowed through the night and the roads were going to be a little messy. But we made it anyway! We met up with my brother's and their girlfriends at Wal Mart. Chris and Kyle were staking out the XBox's. They hung out and guarded that pallet while the rest of us scattered out in the store for our other hot ticket items. It's always fun to go and see the different types of people that are out doing the same thing. Some really are crazy, some are mean, but mostly we find people are friendly and want to help each other out. Standing around for an hour, you get to know what everyone is looking for and as you all stand around waiting for them to allow you to start shopping, you start offering to help this person grab this item and this person grab that item. And they do the same for you. We have witnessed people stealing things out of other people's carts and people yelling at each other. It makes for a good morning. We finally were able to grab all of our stuff that we were looking for and with 2 XBoxes, 1 Shop Vac, a rubber maid set, 3 MP3 players, about 15 movies, and 25 Wii/DS/X box games we were ready to check out. After we left Wal Mart, we had to have some breakfast. There's nothing better than Chick Fil A for breakfast!! Afterwards we went to a few more stores, some of us went home to sleep and some of us got ready to head out for a long day at the North Pole (that will be in another blog). If you have never gone out on black friday to shop, you really should...it's a ton of fun!