Boycotts still work well

And a Happy Thanksgiving weekend ☺️

Hello from Delft 🇳🇱

Happy Thanksgiving to American readers. I genuinely hope your holiday weekend is filled with moments of gratitude, however small or big they may be.

I stopped celebrating Thanksgiving over a decade ago. Living in The Netherlands, the day slips by like any other Thursday, tucked between Sinterklaas sailing in by steamboat earlier in November and the moment he and his elf-slaves deliver gifts in early December. My Dutch ex-husband humored the holiday annually, but in twenty years abroad I only hosted one true Thanksgiving gathering.

My distance from the holiday started as a geographic one—but eventually became ideological. The more time I spent explaining the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving to Europeans, the more the shiny gloss peeled off. Once you tell the story out loud, honestly, aligned with the historical record instead of the American classroom version… you can’t unsee it. You can’t unknow it.

It took years to grapple with the fact that many of the early settlers were not gentle pilgrims but radical fundamentalists. Reframing that truth inside the myth of “land of the free, home of the brave” was not simple.

Living abroad made the contradictions louder. The holiday, stripped of nostalgia, revealed itself as a carefully crafted narrative—one that conveniently forgets who paid the price for the American experiment.

And once I saw it, celebrating felt impossible.

Unconscious capitalism

What complicates Thanksgiving even further is the modern American instinct to monetize everything. Hypercapitalism doesn’t just commercialize holidays—it anesthetizes us to their original meaning. We all know this, of course.

Thanksgiving is one of the few American celebrations that doesn’t require hyper-spending, and still we’ve managed to attach an entire economic frenzy to it.

Black Friday.

Cyber Monday.

“Doorbusters.”

“Limited offers.”

Mountains of wasted food.

Billions spent on things no one needed.

The amount of unnecessary consumption this week is staggering. Any idea of “conscious capitalism” evaporates under the weight of mass-produced waste and emotional manipulation.

Despite all this, there were years when I still honored the holiday privately with annual rituals—a meal with people I loved, conversations centered on gratitude. Sometimes I’d fly home and join my family around the table, practicing the tradition in its familiar, imperfect form.

But over time I realized I’m more aligned with a quieter, self-created ritual of gratitude—one not tethered to nationalism or sanitized history, but to my lived experience as someone holding dual identity and dual cultures.

My friend Jacqui—another yoga teacher in The Hague—vented about how Black Friday feels gross but still pressures small business owners to participate. Her solution was Taupe Tuesday. A soft, neutral, desaturated counter-holiday where she offered seasonal packages without the emotional manipulation of “BUY NOW OR MISS OUT FOREVER!!!”

Taupe Tuesday is about as emotionally neutral as a shopping event can get. Beige energy. Zero frenzy. Ten out of ten, I approve.

When I migrated to Europe in 2005, Black Friday wasn’t popular. Halloween barely existed in communties. And even Christmas gift giving didn't have the same impact verses American culture. And the Dutch, being very committed to being Dutch, didn’t acknowledge American Thanksgiving at all. Rightfully so.

There is an annual service held in the beautiful old St Peter's church in Leiden, where descendants of Mayflower passengers gather to speak. A handful of Dutch pilgrims sailed from that very city before heading to what would become Plymouth Rock. The service is well attended, and the hosts are transparent about facts of these early pilgrims—not quite the quaint caricatures portrayed in American schools.

In those early years of living in The Netherlands, I often felt like I had stepped through a portal taking me at least a decade back. As life in Holland simply moved slower at that time. People shopped less. Not much was found open on Sundays, unless you were in a big city. It was a different rhythm—one I appreciated.

By 2008, though, the global machine caught up. Black Friday sales were everywhere with all the subtlety of a bullhorn. Suddenly every storefront was screaming discounts, and the whole country felt temporarily possessed by fast-fashion fever.

Let’s be honest: Black Friday is not a sale. It’s psychological warfare wrapped in a marketing scheme.

Retailers manufacture urgency—fake scarcity, countdown timers, doom-scrolling anxiety. Your brain gets tricked into thinking it’s 10,000 BC and that discounted air fryer is the last bison on the tundra. In survival mode, the rational mind shuts down. Adrenaline spikes. Dopamine fires. Suddenly you’re buying things you didn’t know existed yesterday.

This isn’t “shopping.” It’s a behavioral experiment. And we’re the test subjects.

Boycott Black Friday

Step out of the scarcity spell. Keep your money, your dignity, and your nervous system intact.

If you wouldn’t want an item at full price on a calm, unbothered Taupe Tuesday, you don’t want it now. The most powerful choice we can make is to opt out.

If you want to engage this weekend, engage in solidarity—not consumption. There are active strikes and organized boycotts happening right now. Look up labor actions at the big names: Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart. Learn which workers are fighting for union rights and fair wages.

Those are the trends worth following.

Those movements shape the future far more than any deep discount sale ever will. We already know this, of course.

Remember to shop locally and support small businesses this holiday season!

In Solidarity xx

Audra