Feature
PAGE 6
HOLIDAY 2014
The Most Gluttonous Time of the Year
Mikayla Knight
Staff Writer
Thanksgiving, a
long day of feasting
and a little too much
family time, comes
and goes each year,
marking the beginning of the holiday
shopping season. Finally, it’s Black Friday.
Some of the more
extreme shoppers
have potentially waited for days, camping
in line for the season’s
hottest new items,
while retailers across
the nation prepare
to open their doors
extremely early offering promotional sales
down every aisle.
Is that really what
Thanksgiving is
about? People iso-
lated, celebrating
outside stores in tents
during the lonely,
dark hours of the
morning, when they
could be in a warm,
sweet-smelling kitchen with their families?
How do the familyoriented traditions of
Thanksgiving compare to the commercialized adaptation
we take part in today?
We’ve all heard
of the post-Thanksgiving shopping
tradition known as
“Black Friday” where
shoppers across
the country spend
the day burning off
calories by chasing
sales. But over the
past few years many
stores have started
opening their doors
even earlier, extending Black Friday by
providing major sales
on Thanksgiving Day
itself.
This tradition is making the focus of this
holiday consumerism rather than family time. But this isn’t
necessarily the fault
of the retailers.
They wouldn’t have
a reason to intrude
on family time if
consumers didn’t
seem to want the
extra shopping day
to begin with. It’s an
issue of supply and
demand: People
demand and retailers
accommodate.
It’s sad the one day
of the year set aside
for giving thanks has
transformed to a commercial celebration.
Maybe if the general
public was more dedicated to spending
time with their families, retailers wouldn’t
keep pushing Black
Friday shopping up to
Thanksgiving.
Then the holiday
could be restored to a
time of giving thanks
from the comfort of
our homes rather than
from winding check
out lines.
This year, in the
spirit of family time, my
family will be enjoying
our meal and decorating for the holidays;
not in line for the
iPhone 6.
Climbing the OCSA Stairmaster
Chris Kelly
Stairs. We all hate them. They
Staff Writer are something every student
here has to deal with on a
regular basis. Eventually the stairs become
something to talk about with people. Like
the weather, or traffic. You may have heard
someone in passing saying something to the
tune of: “I have a class on the 7th floor this
year. At least my thighs will get a workout”.
Which is true, but exactly how true?
So how many calories do you burn in an
average day at OCSA? We’ve measured
the most common paths and counted as
many stairs as you can find to bring you
an easy way to calculate it. In the form of
something that most people hate just as
much as stairs: Algebra.
Your Daily Calorie Equation:
36(# of times you travel between
the ground and second floors) + 45(#
of floors traversed) + 48(# of times you
walk to or from the breezeway) + 33(#
of times you walk from the tower to
the annex) + 13(# of times you walk to
or from 10th street) + (36 bonus calories for walking to and from class) +
(your athletics)
My average day at OCSA burns a grand
total of 1,091 calories. (Remember this formula considers walking down a flight of stairs
in floors traversed. Most places you go, you
come back from so be sure to include that.)
cont’d on pg. 7