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Oracle of DelphiA Day after Thanksgiving: Black Friday
November 23rd 2007 02:36
Today celebrates the day of Black Friday - a day after Thanksgiving.
This day usually differs and only happens on the 4th Friday of November, and this year it hits today - 23 November 2007.
How did it start?
The earliest uses of "Black Friday" refer to the heavy traffic on that day, an implicit comparison to the extremely stressful and chaotic experience of Black Tuesday (the 1929 stock-market crash) or other black days. The earliest known references to "Black Friday" (in this sense) are from two newspaper articles from November 29, 1975, that explicitly refer to the day's hectic nature and heavy traffic. The first reference is in an article entitled "Army vs. Navy: A Dimming Splendor," in The New York Times:
Philadelphia police and bus drivers call it "Black Friday" - that day each year between Thanksgiving Day and the Army-Navy game. It is the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year in the Bicentennial City as the Christmas list is checked off and the Eastern college football season nears conclusion.
The derivation is made even more explicit in an Associated Press article entitled "Folks on Buying Spree Despite Down Economy," which ran in the Titusville Herald on the same day:
Store aisles were jammed. Escalators were nonstop people. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season and despite the economy, folks here went on a buying spree. . . . . "That's why the bus drivers and cab drivers call today 'Black Friday,'" a sales manager at Gimbels said as she watched a traffic cop trying to control a crowd of jaywalkers. "They think in terms of headaches it gives them."
Both articles have a Philadelphia dateline, suggesting the term may have originated in that area. (Wikipedia)
So now we can all officially start preparing Christmas presents. I know I lost Lilla and katyzzz's presents while I was moving to a new place so you both have to bear with me until I redo the presents and send to you...
Happy shopping!
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