I don’t know about you, but personally, the whole festive holiday thing seems to be falling a bit flat this year. Don’t get me wrong, like every other year, I do plan to really go to town on a pumpkin pie or two. But this year, the annual deluge of Black Friday ads egging us on to higher levels of consumption–with corresponding carbon emissions and solid and liquid waste–seemed particularly hollow, morbid–predatory, even–falling as Black Friday did this year on November 29, the date the U.N. first recognized in 1977 as International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This year all the excess, forced pageantry, and planned obsolescence of Black Friday seems in such stark and ironic contrast to the poverty in Gaza.