There are some traditions that just can’t be broken even if it means rushing home from Thanksgiving dinner with family.

That’s just what Jolene Wittmayer-Larkin, a Covington resident, did Thursday night.

“Last night I was in Vancouver and I drove home after dinner,” Wittmayer-Larkin said on Friday morning outside of Walmart.

“You can’t break 20 years of tradition.”

Wittmayer-Larkin was with her mother, Thyla Wittmayer, scouring the early morning Black Friday deals in Covington.

They started at 5 a.m. at Fred Meyer, where Wittmayer works, making the most of the deals and the discounts.

From there they got some breakfast at Jack in the Box then dropped off the first load of items at Wittmayer’s home.

Next stop was Walmart, which had deals at midnight on a number of items in the store and then kicked off the rest of the shopping day at 5 a.m. with bargains in the electronics department.

“We might venture out to Target,” Wittmayer-Larkin said. “Maybe go down to Kmart.”

Wittmayer added, “We might need a nap in between.”

It’s a fun tradition, she said.

The mother-daughter duo were not alone in their shopping exploits.

After 8 a.m. and the end of supplies had come for the electronics deals at Walmart, shoppers were entering and exiting the big box retailer tucked away in the downtown core just a few blocks from Southeast 272nd Street, but the parking lot was not full at that point.

Perhaps bargain hunters had moved on to other stores such as Fred Meyer or Kohl’s which at 9 a.m. was bustling with an even steadier stream of traffic, with shoppers parking in overflow lots near Trapper’s Sushi.

Shoppers headed into Kohl’s in the cold as temperatures had not yet risen above 40 degrees, clutching newspaper ads, while others exited with items on carts or arms laden with bags bearing the department store’s logo.

A pair of women were overheard strategizing how they were going to get their bounty into their car as they headed back to it with a card loaded with goodies.

Despite the challenge, one exclaimed that they were done with shopping for the season.

Time now to wrap those bargains.

Crowds at the stores were large, with reports of 500 people waiting in line to get in from the Target in Kent, as well as the steady stream of shoppers at retailers in downtown Covington.