I expected the computer nerds outside Best Buy at 4 a.m. and the motivated moms outside Kohl’s at 3 a.m., but what I didn’t expect were the entire families – parents with three and four kids – clutching their circulars in the middle of the night.

“The BrandsMart on the 826 (in Miami) was total chaos – like 6,000 people and everyone was fighting in the parking lot,” said Donald Conroy. “The Walmart wasn’t bad, we were in and out, and there was only one fight – over towels.”

This was 2:40 a.m. Friday, and Conroy was in line at the Kohl’s in Hollywood with wife Reyna and three daughters. They had been up all night, making their way straight from Thanksgiving dinner to a pre-dawn retail buffet.

With 20 minutes until opening, the line behind them snaked 500 long.

“I’m here to buy a couple of e-readers – they’re usually $300 and they’re going for $99,” Conroy said. He looked at daughter Kimberly, 9.

“One’s for her,” he said.

“Really?!” she said.

Kimberly gave him a big hug.

“You see that? That’s what makes this worth it,” Donald said.

My first foray into Black Friday madness was quite the awakening.

I’ve risen at 2 a.m. only a few times in my life – for a space shuttle landing and an execution, early cross-country flights and the birth of my daughter – but never to shop.

Actually, I wasn’t here to shop but to observe, sort of like a postmodern Margaret Mead.

“It’s kind of hilarious,” said Stephanie Picon, 21, a Dartmouth anthropology major, as she waited to buy a laptop with her father and a friend outside the Best Buy in Boca Raton before the 5 a.m. opening.

I didn’t see any fights or stampedes, but I did hear the Kohl’s crowd burst into “Jingle Bells” when the doors flew open. I heard two guys scream, “Woo-hoo! Get those sales, get those sales!” after they climbed from their pickup truck at a Target west of Boca Raton.

And I met a woman who camped outside the Best Buy since 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, just to save a couple hundred bucks on a Netbook computer and some other Christmas gifts.

“This is my fourth year,” said Sandi Collins, of Boca Raton.

Collins brought a tent, a cooler and a DVD player to pass the time. Her 17-year-old son brought a plate of Thanksgiving dinner from a friend’s.

Uh, do people think you’re…

“Crazy?” Collins said, before I could finish. “Yes. But you really do get good prices.”

Why wait two nights when the people at line’s end will get into the store five minutes after you?

She explained that there were only seven Netbooks available at the sale price, and that store staff distributed slips for the limited items to those in line at 3 a.m.

“This is the first time they’ve done that,” she said. “It’s very civilized. People always try to cut the line and cheat. They’re weasels.”

I asked Picon, the Dartmouth anthropology major, what scholars might say about this phenomenon in a few hundred years.

“I don’t know – everyone will probably shop online by then,” she said. “At least this is social. It’s human interaction.”

And it’s commercial, a never-ending expansion of the holiday season that doesn’t observe any boundaries of space or time.

So now we have a nonstop parade of maniacal marketing, Black Friday followed by Cyber Monday, along with stores like Sears open for business on Thanksgiving and malls like Sawgrass Mills open just past the stroke of midnight Thursday.

“The ladies want to come, so we come,” a bedraggled Jayess Patel said outside Sawgrass Mills in Sunrise at 6 a.m.

He sat on a bench with a passel of bags, two teen kids and a niece in a stroller. His wife and sister-in-law were still inside. They left their Boca Raton home at 12:30 a.m. This was their second year of all-night shopping.

“I’m amazed at this,” said Edith Borden, of Hallandale Beach, outside the Kohl’s in Hollywood.

She is originally from Philadelphia, where the “Black Friday” name was first coined for the post-Thanksgiving shopping jams.

“Everybody used to go into town with their kids to shop and see Santa Claus, but the stores had regular hours,” she said.

This year she awoke at 1:30 a.m. to meet her daughter-in-law for a pre-dawn retail spree. They sought bedspreads and comforters, and they also had Target (5 a.m. opening) in their targets.

When I grew up, I didn’t know about Black Friday. We called it “the day after Thanksgiving.” Organized shopaholics would head to the stores and knock off their entire gift lists. I hated those people.

It meant they didn’t have a right proper Thanksgiving feast, the kind that would cause them to lay around in a turkey-induced coma for most of Friday before heading to the fridge to make a leftover sandwich just before a college football game kicked off.

Those were simpler times, when the holiday season didn’t officially begin until Santa Claus appeared at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and if you were up at 3 a.m., it meant you were in a bar.

Now there are stores with Christmas decorations and merchandise at Halloween. Halloween!

“I remember when you didn’t shop for Christmas until December,” said Bill Brumby, of Boca Raton, as he stood in the dark outside Best Buy. “Now they try to rush everything.”

Bah humbug to all this holiday hype!

Next year I’m sleeping in.

Michael Mayo can be reached at or 954-356-4508. Read his blog online weekdays at