If you do decide that shopping is the answer, you'll be set to save a lot in the coming weeks of post-holiday markdowns. Due to an unusually bad holiday season for retailers -- with sales down 19% to 21% for apparel, and 26% for electronics -- stores are making huge markdowns and coming up with creative ways to rid shelves of merchandise. Retailers are bundling goods, offering a free wingchair with a couch, for instance, and every incarnation of buy one-get one free imaginable.

With analysts worrying about whether it's possible to "retrain the consumer to pay full price," it's certain that consumers are in a good place. Don't be retrained, people! Embrace your obstinacy in this post-holiday please-let-it-be-a-recovery markdown period.

Ahh, the eighties. How luxury goods makers must miss you. In those days, Gucci and Tiffany never would have heard the request, "May I get that in a brown paper bag?" But these days, the rich are in hiding and conspicuous consumption needs to be a little less conspicuous. Most famously, according to The Daily Beast, Lehman CEO Dick Fuld's wife, Kathleen, asked for a white bag instead of Hermes' iconic orange one when making some recent extravagant purchases. Message: it's ok to spend money like it's still 1999. Let's just not let the paparazzi and the little people in on it.

As grocery store shoppers get comfortable bringing their own reusable totes to carry home their purchases (obviating the once-obvious superiority of bags from an upscale grocery store), the wealthy are finding another reason that handfuls of colorful shopping bags are no longer the most wonderful thing to be hanging from one's hand around the holidays. For wealthy customers, it's a desire not to see, and to be unseen; for those whose pockets aren't quite as full, it's just a matter of planet-consciousness.

Instead of showing solidarity with the less fortunate, however, I think the unmarked bag trick goes somewhere else: into a place where the doors to the club of the super-rich is even more unassailable. Now it's the aspirational folk who want their purchases to be flaunted, whereas the real money wink-winks at one another. White bag on the arm of the wife of a fallen executive? If you know, you know where she's been shopping. She won't make headlines. But her Park Avenue neighbors can nod their heads in affirmation. Kathleen's ok, they are saying. She's just not going to shove it in the faces of all those penniless Lehman stockholders -- and the rest of the U.S. taxpayer base, bailing those poor CEOs out, and fueling the next clandestine shopping trip.

Last night I watched the latest episode of Life, which described a murder shortly before a mall opens on Black Friday. The detectives are standing in the path of shoppers who flood the mall at 6 a.m. and all any fiscally sensible person can ask herself is: why? At least, that's what I ask myself, and I'm not alone: so does Jeffrey Strain at MainStreet.

He tells the "Money Sapping Secrets of Black Friday Sales" and gives several reasons why you shouldn't. First: You don't need any of this stuff. (My thinking exactly.) Second: You can use the time you save waiting in line for hours to get the best deals to save yourself money! Without all the aching feet and strained shoulders! Genius. His next several reasons are basically, You're not getting the deal you think you're getting. Supplies are limited. Seasoned "professional" Black Friday shoppers will get the good stuff first. You'll buy things that you weren't shopping for in the first place. You'll neglect opportunity costs and other costs (gas to get to that great mall, a late breakfast at a pricey mall restaurant to cure your shopping munchies, batteries and accessories, etc.) when you figure your savings.

I've got another reason: true happiness cannot be found by a good bout of swapping cash for goods, no matter how many times you see it dramatized on those television commercials. Instead of making family traditions around shopping on Thanksgiving weekend, why not make a family tradition around reading a book, or playing checkers. (Make sure it's a book or a game you already own!) Or better yet, extend the season of gratitude by doing something nice to someone who's been good to you all year. I'm planning to go visit my favorite farmer and tell her how grateful I am that she's changing the world one chicken at a time.