Black Friday

I'm not out shopping today. That's not to say I'm not shopping, just not out and about. Not yet anyway.

But social media has lots of good posts about the mess you guys are in out there.

For example, you are more likely to get in a fight on Black Friday in Arkansas than in any other state. So says estately.com and the thousands of us who reposted. Honestly, I think this may apply to any day of the year in Arkansas, not just Black Friday. Just saying'...

Everybody is posting pictures of the food they ate and who they ate with. The variety of the celebrations fascinates me.

erlc.com/theweekly

And most people post something about being thankful. Sometimes it's just a general statement and other times it's a pretty good list. I wonder if many of us think to thank God for all this rather than just to be thankful in some way that's detached from the giver of all gifts.

The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention distributes a weekly email called The Weekly that contains tidbits of information relevant to the week. This week's email came today and the following was the top article. Before getting to the article, let me make a couple of comments. Go to erlc.com/theweekly and sign up to receive The Weekly in your inbox.

Notice that Black Friday was first used to indicate the dark side of bad side of the holiday rush - traffic. What a mess the traffic must have been in the 1950s! Imagine what the Philadelphia PD officers from that time would say if they had to work today. Anyway, while shoppers think of Black Friday as The Day to get great deals, and while businesses see Black Friday as the key to making a profit for the year, the term started as a negative. Isn't it uncanny the way we can turn a negative image into a money-maker?

Here's the article.

5 Facts About Black Friday

Today is the unofficial first day of the holiday shopping season. Here are five facts you should know about “Black Friday.”

1. The term "Black Friday" was coined by the Philadelphia Police Department's traffic squad in the 1950s. According to Philadelphia newspaper reporter Joseph P. Barrett, “It was the day that Santa Claus took his chair in the department stores and every kid in the city wanted to see him. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season.” Barrettt first used the term in the city’s newspaper, the Evening Bulletin, in 1961 to refer to the traffic problems on that day. Local merchants complained to police commissioner Albert N. Brown about the negative association of the term, so Brown released a press release describing the day as “Big Friday.” By then it was too late; the media had already started referring to the day after Thanksgiving as  “Black Friday.”

2. Because so few people were aware of the origin of the term Black Friday, an alternative explanation became popular: that it is the day on which retailers finally began to show a profit for the year (in accounting terms, moving from being "in the red" to "in the black"). The earliest use of this meaning, though, dates only to the early 1980s.

3. The predecessor to “Black Friday” was the “Santa Claus parade.” Canadian department store Eaton's held the first Santa Claus parade on December 2, 1905. Santa’s appearance at the end of the parade signaled that the holiday season — and Christmas shopping — had begun. In the U.S., the department store Macy’s adopted the idea and started sponsoring similar parades across the country. The most famous event, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, began in 1924.

4. For several years in the 1930s, the date of Thanksgiving was moved to increase the Christmas shopping period. At the request of retailers, Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to move his holiday proclamation up one week to the fourth Thursday in November. Of the then-48 states, 32 joined Roosevelt in the “Democratic Thanksgiving” while 16 stuck with the “Republican Thanksgiving” of the traditional date. After critics complained about “Franksgiving,” Roosevelt signed legislation making Thanksgiving a legal holiday on the fourth Thursday in November.

5. In 2009, K-Mart became the first major national retailer to open its stores on Thanksgiving morning. Several other large retailers—including Wal-Mart, Sears, and Toys R Us—also began opening their stores a day early in 2011. Since then, Black Friday has been replaced by what some retailers refer to as “Grey Thursday.”