Thanksgiving – Julie Fredrickson

You can tell the year is wrapping up as soon as Thanksgiving and Cyber Shopping discourse gives way to “best of” discourse. The transition was so smooth today. Stories of the American consumer are giving way to all kinds of beat and end of year lists.

Writing a “best of” lists is a thankless job. It is probably a bit worse than being a gift guide editor, as at least those jobs might involve some cool products to test.

I wouldn’t mind doing a gift guide for skincare for people in your life as I love to give beauty gifts but the pressure of doing an Allure “best of beauty” run through is pain from all directions.

And so I’m seeing the “rush hour” part of 2025 go out at speed as Substackers, literature, and all types of style sections bring out the “best of” pieces on Giving Tuesday. Because can we please be done with shopping?

I am about as done as I feel I can be with this very strange year. I wouldn’t mind a rush hour if it sped us up. But I’m sure the traffic jam of finishing up December will be the actual look of rush hour. Just like with a real life rush hour. Maybe we are close to Waymo fixing that for good. Now that would be a “best of” for technology for any list.

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving is a weird day for travel. If you could get the whole week off, chances are good you already traveled over the weekend. If you couldn’t swing the time off, you are probably running with the masses on Wednesday.

Those only taking one day off of work is a bit of a no man’s land for transit. I am oddly in that camp this year. For many years I worked Black Friday and simply didn’t consider any portion of the week a holiday.

I’m lucky that the Bozeman airport is one of the most pleasant airports in all of America. I breezed through security with a golden retriever puppy behind me and a chocolate lab puppy in front of me.

Part security you have gorgeous views of the Bridgers, friendly people, hilarious warnings to leave your bear spray behind, and a spot to get a wood fired pizza before takeoff that is actually good.

The woman checking my bag in said the record was 30 confiscated in a day but the most she had personally handled was 5 of them.

Even more exciting was finding I’d been upgraded to first class on my commuter flight. Sometimes you do just get lucky when you hit the road.