From our first days in school, or on the playground, we learn the “Count Off.”

To keep track of a classroom full of kids, one of the first things first graders learn from busy teachers is to “count off.” Especially during fire drills or field trips, it is imperative that every child be accounted for. The presence of every one of them is assured by reaching the proper total number. Besides learning to count off to get a total tally, sometimes the kids “count off” by two’s or four’s, a fast, easy way to divide up into teams. (Remember how you and your best friends would guess where to stand in the counting-off line so that you could end up on the same team?)

There is a lot of “counting off” that happens during the Christmas season count-down. Retailers groused this year that Thanksgiving c…