The Origin of Black Friday

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Black Friday is the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States (the fourth Thursday of November). Since the early 2000s, it has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the US, and most major retailers open very early and offer promotional sales. Black Friday is not a public holiday,.....

Origin of the term

"Black Friday" as a term has been used in multiple contexts, going back to the nineteenth century,^[42] where in the United States it was associated with a financial crisis of 1869. The earliest known use of "Black Friday" to refer to shopping on the day after Thanksgiving was made in a public relations newsletter from 1961 that is clear on the negative implications of the name and its origin in Philadelphia:

For downtown merchants throughout the nation, the biggest shopping days normally are the two following Thanksgiving Day. Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday. Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by the merchants with their Deputy City Representative, Abe S. Rosen, one of the country's most experienced municipal PR executives. He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday.^[43]

The attempt to rename Black Friday was unsuccessful, and its continued use is shown in a 1966 publication on the day's significance in Philadelphia:

JANUARY 1966 – "Black Friday" is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. "Black Friday" officially opens the Christmas shopping season in Center City, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.^[7]

The term "Black Friday" began to get wider exposure around 1975, as shown by two newspaper articles from November 29, 1975, both datelined Philadelphia. 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 also clear in an Associated Press article entitled "Folks on Buying Spree Despite Down Economy", which ran in Pennsylvania's 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."

The term's spread was gradual, however, and in 1985 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that retailers in Cincinnati and Los Angeles were still unaware of the term.^[44]

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Origin of Thanksgiving Day

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Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada as a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year. It is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States and on the second Monday of October in Canada. Several other places around the world observe similar celebrations. Thanksgiving has its historical roots in religious and cultural traditions and has long been celebrated in a secular manner as well.

History

Prayers of thanks and special thanksgiving ceremonies are common among almost all religions after harvests and at other times.^[1]The Thanksgiving holiday's history in North America is rooted in English traditions dating from the Protestant Reformation. It also has aspects of a harvest festival, even though the harvest in New England occurs well before the late-November date on which the modern Thanksgiving holiday is celebrated.^[1][2]

In the English tradition, days of thanksgiving and special thanksgiving religious services became important during the English Reformation in the reign of Henry VIII and in reaction to the large number of religious holidays on the Catholic calendar. Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were required to attend church and forego work and sometimes pay for expensive celebrations. The 1536 reforms reduced the number of Church holidays to 27, but some Puritans wished to completely eliminate all Church holidays, including Christmas and Easter. The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans viewed as acts of special providence. Unexpected disasters or threats of judgement from on high called for Days of Fasting. Special blessings, viewed as coming from God, called for Days of Thanksgiving. For example, Days of Fasting were called on account of drought in 1611, floods in 1613, and plagues in 1604 and 1622. Days of Thanksgiving were called following the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 and following the deliverance of Queen Anne in 1705. An unusual annual Day of Thanksgiving began in 1606 following the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and developed into Guy Fawkes Day.^[3]

In Canada

Main article: Thanksgiving (Canada)

While some researchers state that "there is no compelling narrative of the origins of the Canadian Thanksgiving day",^[4] the first Canadian Thanksgiving is often traced.... finish reading here.

Origin of Veteran's Day

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Veterans Day is an official United States federal holiday that is observed annually on November 11, honoring people who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, also known as veterans. It coincides with other holidays including Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the end of World War I (major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, when the Armistice with Germany went into effect). The United States also originally observed Armistice Day; it then evolved into the current Veterans Day holiday in 1954.

Veterans Day is not to be confused with Memorial Day; Veterans Day celebrates the service of all U.S. military veterans, while Memorial Day is a day of remembering the men and women who gave their lives and those who perished while in service.^[1]

Most sources spell Veterans as a simple plural without a possessive apostrophe (Veteran's or Veterans').

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Daylight Savings Time Ends

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Daylight saving time

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This article is about the concept of daylight saving time. For local implementations, see Daylight saving time by country.

Daylight saving time (DST) or summer time is the practice of advancing clocks during summer months by one hour so that in the evening hours day light is experienced later, while sacrificing normal sunrise times. Typically, users in regions with summer time adjust clocks forward one hour close to the start of spring and adjust them backward in the autumn to standard time.^[1]

New Zealander George Hudson proposed the modern idea of daylight saving in 1895.^[2] Germany and Austria-Hungary organized the first implementation, starting on 30 April 1916. Many countries have used it at various times since then, particularly since the energy crisis of the 1970s.

The practice has received both advocacy and criticism.^[1] Putting clocks forward benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours,^[3] but can cause problems for evening entertainment and for other activities tied to sunlight, such as farming.^[4][5] Although some early proponents of DST aimed to reduce evening use of incandescent lighting, which was formerly a primary use of electricity,^[6] modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly and research about how DST currently affects energy use is limited or contradictory.^[7]

DST clock shifts sometimes complicate timekeeping and can disrupt travel, billing, record keeping, medical devices, heavy equipment,^[8] and sleep patterns.^[9] Computer software can often adjust clocks automatically, but policy changes by various jurisdictions of the dates and timings of DST may be confusing.^[10]

Rationale[edit]

Industrialized societies generally follow a clock-based schedule for daily activities that does not change throughout the course of the year. The time of day that individuals begin and end work or school, and the coordination of mass transit, for example, usually remain constant year-round. In contrast, an agrarian society's daily routines for work and personal conduct are more likely governed by the length of daylight hours^[11][12] and solar time, which change seasonally because of the Earth's axial tilt. North and south of the tropics daylight lasts longer in summer and shorter in winter, the effect becoming greater as one moves away from the tropics.

By synchronously resetting all clocks in a region to one hour ahead of Standard Time (one hour "fast"), individuals who follow such a year-round schedule will wake an hour earlier than they would have otherwise; they will begin and complete daily work routines an hour earlier, and they will have an extra hour of daylight after their workday activities.^[13][14] However, they will have one less hour of daylight at the start of each day, making the policy less practical during winter.^[15][16]

While the times of sunrise and sunset change at roughly equal rates as the seasons change, proponents of Daylight Saving Time argue that most people prefer a greater increase in daylight hours after the typical "nine-to-five" workday.^[17][18] Supporters have also argued that DST decreases energy consumption by reducing the need for lighting and heating, but the actual effect on overall energy use is heavily disputed. (See: Dispute over benefits and drawbacks section)

The manipulation of time at higher latitudes (for example Iceland, Nunavut or Alaska) has little impact on daily life, because the length of day and night changes more extremely throughout the seasons (in comparison to other latitudes), and thus sunrise and sunset times are significantly out of sync with standard working hours regardless of manipulations of the clock.^[19] DST is also of little use for locations near the equator, because these regions see only a small variation in daylight throughout the year.^[20]

History[edit]

Ancient water clock that lets hour lengths vary with season.

Although they did not fix their schedules to the clock in the modern sense, ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern DST does, often dividing daylight into twelve.... to continue, click here.

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Cherise, the Mompreneur