The answer was supposed to be “Christmas!”
It was an easy question, and it was posed to a child of about 6 — an age when Christmas is presumed to be on a child’s mind all year long.
The way the question was phrased was this:
“What’s the holiday that comes after Thanksgiving?”
The kid’s confident answer shut down the room:
“Black Friday!”
I was there to witness the reaction, which consisted mostly of adults gasping for air.
More than one little child has come to believe that Black Friday is an actual holiday. The day when people are encouraged to storm the malls and wait in lines overnight outside stores that sell electronics has entered into the psyche of our culture and taken root with stunning speed. We used to complain that holidays like Mother’s Day, Easter and Christmas were being taken over by commercialization. Now consumer culture has a holiday all of its own.
What’s particularly stunning here is that the term “Black Friday” was, for more than 100 years, associated with financial calamity, untold suffering, even a kind of jinx.
“Black Friday” was the name for the financial panic in 1869 when two speculators attempted to corner the U.S. gold market. It is sometimes used instead of “Good Friday” to mark the day when Christ died. There are dozens of historical events called “Black Friday,” all of them bad.
Other mentions of the term include a classic horror flick starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, a 1970s kung fu movie starring Wang Yu, and a James Patterson paperback thriller about violence on Wall Street.
Here in Honolulu, in February 1998 when then-Mayor Jeremy Harris announced plans to lay off 185 city employees and eliminate 150 unfilled vacancies, city workers dubbed it “Black Friday.”
But the weight of all that ominous association seems to have vanished.
The first use of the new “Black Friday” in Honolulu that I could find dated to November 2000, when a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin interviewed a woman standing outside the KB Toy Store in Ala Moana at 3:30 in the morning the day after Thanksgiving. She was hoping to get her hands on a Celebration Holiday Barbie doll for $19 — a toy and a price that now seem so quaint. “Merchants often call today ‘Black Friday,’ referring to the hope that the holiday shopping season will put their stores in the black for the year,” the story read. Nowadays this definition of the term is the first one that comes to mind.
Black Friday the unofficial holiday seems to have matured and evolved. There are fewer stories of stampedes and mayhem, and the guys sitting outside Best Buy for three nights are doing it to maintain a tradition. Black Friday deals are seeping into the rest of the month or are readily available online, diluting the once-powerful potion of one-day-only savings.
Black Friday established itself without governmental proclamation, activist petitions or official designation on calendars. It was all advertising. It was all consumer demand. Earth Day seemed to require much more effort. And you don’t even get a day off for that one.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
