Thanksgiving is a day to spend with your family and to be grateful for everyone and everything you have. It’s a special day once a year to get together as a family to communicate, cook, dress up and just enjoy time together with the people you love.

When you are a child Thanksgiving is a good day — you get to play or just talk to others your age.

When you are in your early teens you enjoy more of the communicating and food. As you slowly start to become an adult, everything changes with all your new priorities in life involving school and work.

This year my Thanksgiving wasn’t the same. It was mandatory — I worked at my job because I am a cashier and Black Friday drives people crazy with all the deals so the store needs all the help they can get.

My family’s tradition on Thanksgiving is to eat at night as a family and end the night by eating dessert and watching movies. This year that wasn’t the case.

My family this year changed up our tradition due to my brother and I have to work and we had to have Thanksgiving a little early. It felt rushed, but it was a good dinner. Still, it was not the same as it used to be.

But after having an amazing short dinner it was time for work and since this was my first year working on Thanksgiving I was scared, anxious and a little nervous about how it would go. Checking out a huge amount of people who have waited for maybe hours to get an item, is not fun.

We have all heard some crazy stories about Black Friday and those stories of fights, craziness and bad shifts stories made me a little worried about how my night will go.

The Black Friday tradition used to be a lot better than it is today. Stores had their sales going on the day after Thanksgiving so employees could have the day off and spend time with family.

Deal’s would start at midnight, by the time family was asleep or heading home. It wasn’t until two years ago that Black Friday deals started the same day as Thanksgiving, mainly because of the madness that went on in stores in the middle of the night. That crazy madness that would go on now made it more difficult for employees to have a family friendly Thanksgiving at home.

When I eventually got to work my store did a good job of having everything organized we were divided into groups of cashiers, retail associates, and electronics. There was also a person at every lane conducting to make sure no cashier lane would get too full.

It seemed like my store was prepared this year due to past experience. As a cashier, the madness for me started at 6 p.m. but it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought. I ended up having some very nice customers who talked to me about how they were very grateful for store employees and they wished me luck as they left.

I did end up getting some mean customers who just wanted to go home or got mad over a wrong priced item, but I also didn’t take it personally because everyone gets mad over bad advertising. Nothing crazy happened to me. I think that was due to how well prepared my store was and how I managed to do my job efficiently.

Overall, I didn’t have a Black Friday experience that was bad enough to make me cry or quit, but I did miss out on spending quality time with my family and that was bad. I know any employee could agree with me, especially if you are at the age when college is around the corner and you want to spend the most time with your family as you can.

I personally think Black Friday should continue to go on a day after Thanksgiving but maybe at noon the next day to keep away from violence and madness breaking out. A whole family deserves to be together on a special holiday like Thanksgiving.