Black Friday is the ominous nickname given to the day after Thanksgiving, the start of the holiday shopping season and one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Supposedly the term was first used in reference to the day's heavy traffic and chaos, with "Black Friday" stemming from the term "Black Tuesday" (the 1929 stock-market crash) and other similarly stressful and terrifying "black" days. The more modern definition of the term is an accounting reference, in which positive amounts of money are marked in black, while negative amounts are marked in red.

This year, I was convinced - by the need for new jeans - to join my aunt, mother and sister in downtown Seattle on Black Friday. A little curious and unsure of what to expect, I simply followed their lead. I soon found out that this meant waking up at five in the morning on a school holiday and being downtown by 5: 40 a.m.

Bleary eyed and wanting of a good breakfast, I found myself outside the Macy's downtown department store at 5:45 a.m. Have you ever seen those TV commercials advertising the after-holiday sales where a crowd of women are huddled outside the several glass doors chanting, "Open, open, open, open?" If you take away the part about the crowd being composed of only middle-aged women and add lots of red Starbucks' coffee cups, then you have a pretty accurate picture of 5:45 in the morning on Black Friday outside Macy's.

New to the whole Black Friday experience, I kept looking around expecting the shopping-crazed mob to swell around the block. Yet, minute after minute, it's still the same people. I was beginning to believe that the whole event was a mass hoax. Did these 50 or so odd anxious customers really think that their chances of nabbing the best sale items were being threatened by the other 49 people pressing eagerly around them?

At about 5:50 a.m. the first row of doors opened. The mob pressed forward, now huddling anxiously against the interior doors. Woo! We had moved a whole 10 feet.

Within minutes the final doors opened and the mob rushed forward. Each person made a beeline for his or her first destination. Seconds later, all was silent and still. That's when I realized that 50 people had just been spread out across four, block-wide floors - that's not even 15 people per floor!

Now here I have to pause and say that no one - absolutely no one - has the right to complain about the customer service on Black Friday. While it is true that check out lines were abominably slow and horrifyingly long and that the employees probably all harbored an urge to beat us to death with their barcode-reading wands, everyone should give a very long, loud round of applause to those people who woke up and went to work at some God-awful hour just so that we could shop. My hats off to all of you who had to work the early shift on Black Friday. I, for the record, will say that every employee I came across that day was perfectly pleasant and cheerful.

Several hours later, our shopping troupe of four decided that we needed to cross the street. There was one problem. Separating us from the Gap was the annual day after Thanksgiving parade. Hundreds of people lined both sides of the street just enjoying the festivities with their friends and family. Small children were squealing happily as parade participators tossed Frangos into the crowd. But, boy-oh-boy, we shoppers didn't care one bit. We weren't about to be hindered by any parade! There was much jostling and angry glares as the four of us and many other wallet-at-the-ready shoppers saw a break in the baton twirlers and ran for it! I felt bad when I tripped over a woman sitting on the sidewalk, but I couldn't help it! The surge of people behind me was forcing me onward.

By the end of the day, that being noon, all we wanted to do was go home and sleep. It had been so long and we were so tired that we couldn't even remember what we'd purchased.

I still have very mixed feelings about Black Friday, but it was certainly a very interesting experience. ...I think that next year I'll sleep in instead.

Kyra-lin Hom can be reached at kl_hom@yahoo.com