Early last week, I got a confirmation e-mail that my store was opening at 6 p.m. Thanksgiving night.

Working at the mall, this e-mail was not really surprising, aside from the fact that we were set to open two hours earlier than the previous year.

Not much earlier, I was told that I was going to be opening manager that night, which also was not surprising. Retailers have been slowly creeping up on the holiday to cash in on eager holiday shoppers.

According to a recent poll by Huffington Post, roughly 20 percent of people in a low-income household had a family member working on Thanksgiving. Major retailers like Macy’s and Target have been offenders of the holiday sale creep, with Best Buy opening as early as 5 p.m. that evening. Target even ignored a petition with over 350,000 signatures aimed at getting the company to push back their hours.

I am the first to tell people that I am not a very family-oriented person. I am not big on holiday cheer and I do not get that excited feeling of being around family that everyone else gets so thrilled about at this time of the year.

However, that does not change the fact that I love my family and my family loves me. My family loves to see me for the holidays, and this time around, I did not even have time to so much as set the table before heading off to work.

Since the store was set to open at 6 p.m., I had to be there at least two hours ahead of time to find parking and make sure everything in my store was perfectly folded and marked for holiday shoppers. That meant that I had to leave home at around 4 p.m. to get to work. Having four households to visit, these new holiday hours only gave me time to see one set of family members for lunch.

I honestly never found working on the holidays to be problematic; I have worked on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I have even worked some of those shifts back to back.

My family has never even really been all that upset about it either — we all reschedule and regroup accordingly, so I do not have to miss out on all of the holiday festivities.

But now it is getting to the point where rescheduling is just not cutting it and my family will not get to see me for the holidays. I have already not seen my dad in months due to my work schedule and status as a full-time student.

I understand that holiday shopping has become a family activity to get excited about. I understand that the sales are an added bonus to the fun of staying up late to be at the mall and running around wildly for the presents that you saved for and planned to surprise your loved ones with. I truly understand it and I love to see all of your happy faces shopping around and telling me about all of the great finds you’ve purchased.

But I want to urge you to shop online this holiday season. I know these sales events are chances for everyone to purchase goods at the price they feel the items are worth, and that sometimes it is the only time a person can afford anything extra, but at the end of the day, family comes first during the holidays — even for little grinches like myself.

There is not one holiday manager that I have met so far that has not come to me frazzled about what they will do when their company confirms their holiday hours.

Holiday workers should get to be home for the holidays.