Great essay. I enjoy when issues are not totally resolved and future generations must continue to add their perspectives.
Regarding Black Friday in the US, I remember reading long ago that retailers looked to the day as time to get "into the black" with sales for the rest of the year. Not doing so might be the end of a business. And does the UK have Black Friday shopping madness despite not having Thanksgiving?
We do! I never know when Thanksgiving is (especially because I'm married to a Canadian and it's different there), but – even though it's relatively recent – Black Friday is now ubiquitous here...
The 'into the black' story is certainly one of the propositions that's been put forward over the years as a positive rather than 'calamitous' narrative. I wondered whether the medieval equivalent might have been Black Monday being a 'black-letter day' in the Church calendar, rather than the 'red-letter days' of Church feasts, but sadly that didn't seem to hold water!
That certainly was the explanation of US newscasters in the 1980s when they would cover Black Friday store openings live. I certainly don’t remember anything like it before the 1980s. Weird decade, I know.
I have always assumed that Black Friday comes from the fact that, before the Internet, in the US, Black Friday shopping meant waking up at oh-my-God-o' clock the day after giving yourself tryptophan poisoning, and the going to stand in line for the hours so that you could buy a tv very cheaply (fortunately, not a tradition my family observed). I have a clear memory of going to Best Buy at 9 am on Black Friday, and my mother getting in line immediately after we got there. My father, my brother, and I went and fetched the things on our lists. We all pretended we couldn't see what everyone else was picking up. There hours later, we finally had our purchases made, and or was a decade before my mother willingly entered a Best Buy again (she still about it, and it's been 30 years).
But I'm fascinated by the history of colors + days, and the vagaries of language, dates, and memory.
I thought the modern Black Monday was a retail problem derived from the fact that no one wanted to shop on the Friday and weekend after US Thanksgiving. A black day indeed. They started discounting heavily to get people into the shops. The queues became legendary, starting on Thanksgiving itself so they moved the day of the sale back to the following Monday.
Fabulous as always, H! One of the multidinous things there are to love about Shakespeare is the sense of his work being towards the end of a world that is both Christian and deeply folkloric. Hence, I wasn't surprised to look and find Lancelot Gobbo saying to Shylock "I will not say you shall see a masque, but if you do, then it was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last", to which Shylock responds with a diatribe against what I think is properly a pre-Reformation performance culture - "Christian fools with varnished faces", etc.
I love this. Fifty years on this green earth and I still absolutely boggle at the fact that the past was real. Real people! Real weather! Real everything. Wtf.
Fascinating article. Here in Australia Black (day) is usually attached to a day of fire storms when the sky is blacken by smoke, along with property losses and deaths. Such as Black Friday in 1930s Victoria and Black Wednesday in February 1983 when I was sitting in a hospital in the middle of Melbourne crying because the world was coming to an end and I’d only just given birth to my son.
And we moan when the temperature drops to five! Imagine dying sitting on your horse - you would think the animal's warmth might be a help. And as for being killed by hailstones - we just don't know how lucky we are in our warm cars and centrally heated houses. Although like all over 65's, I remember when cars didn't have heaters and when we woke up in our freezing bedrooms to find frost on the inside of the windowpanes, and the water in the wash stand frozen solid. No en-suites in those days!
Great essay. I enjoy when issues are not totally resolved and future generations must continue to add their perspectives.
Regarding Black Friday in the US, I remember reading long ago that retailers looked to the day as time to get "into the black" with sales for the rest of the year. Not doing so might be the end of a business. And does the UK have Black Friday shopping madness despite not having Thanksgiving?
We do! I never know when Thanksgiving is (especially because I'm married to a Canadian and it's different there), but – even though it's relatively recent – Black Friday is now ubiquitous here...
The 'into the black' story is certainly one of the propositions that's been put forward over the years as a positive rather than 'calamitous' narrative. I wondered whether the medieval equivalent might have been Black Monday being a 'black-letter day' in the Church calendar, rather than the 'red-letter days' of Church feasts, but sadly that didn't seem to hold water!
That certainly was the explanation of US newscasters in the 1980s when they would cover Black Friday store openings live. I certainly don’t remember anything like it before the 1980s. Weird decade, I know.
I have always assumed that Black Friday comes from the fact that, before the Internet, in the US, Black Friday shopping meant waking up at oh-my-God-o' clock the day after giving yourself tryptophan poisoning, and the going to stand in line for the hours so that you could buy a tv very cheaply (fortunately, not a tradition my family observed). I have a clear memory of going to Best Buy at 9 am on Black Friday, and my mother getting in line immediately after we got there. My father, my brother, and I went and fetched the things on our lists. We all pretended we couldn't see what everyone else was picking up. There hours later, we finally had our purchases made, and or was a decade before my mother willingly entered a Best Buy again (she still about it, and it's been 30 years).
But I'm fascinated by the history of colors + days, and the vagaries of language, dates, and memory.
This is family history at its best!
Here in the UK we've only had Black Friday since the internet, I think I'm right in saying...
I thought the modern Black Monday was a retail problem derived from the fact that no one wanted to shop on the Friday and weekend after US Thanksgiving. A black day indeed. They started discounting heavily to get people into the shops. The queues became legendary, starting on Thanksgiving itself so they moved the day of the sale back to the following Monday.
Shopping-related explanations are in the mix, certainly, but the whole thing does seem to reach back further into the past...
Fabulous as always, H! One of the multidinous things there are to love about Shakespeare is the sense of his work being towards the end of a world that is both Christian and deeply folkloric. Hence, I wasn't surprised to look and find Lancelot Gobbo saying to Shylock "I will not say you shall see a masque, but if you do, then it was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last", to which Shylock responds with a diatribe against what I think is properly a pre-Reformation performance culture - "Christian fools with varnished faces", etc.
More of a comment, than a question…
A perfect comment – I'd wondered if I could say something about Shakespeare but it wouldn't have had this insight... Thank you
I love this. Fifty years on this green earth and I still absolutely boggle at the fact that the past was real. Real people! Real weather! Real everything. Wtf.
Right?! I spend all my time trying to imagine my way into their world and regularly barrel into a profound sense of what? really? how!
Fascinating article. Here in Australia Black (day) is usually attached to a day of fire storms when the sky is blacken by smoke, along with property losses and deaths. Such as Black Friday in 1930s Victoria and Black Wednesday in February 1983 when I was sitting in a hospital in the middle of Melbourne crying because the world was coming to an end and I’d only just given birth to my son.
I had no idea about this – thank you! And what a thing to cope with when you'd just given birth...
And we moan when the temperature drops to five! Imagine dying sitting on your horse - you would think the animal's warmth might be a help. And as for being killed by hailstones - we just don't know how lucky we are in our warm cars and centrally heated houses. Although like all over 65's, I remember when cars didn't have heaters and when we woke up in our freezing bedrooms to find frost on the inside of the windowpanes, and the water in the wash stand frozen solid. No en-suites in those days!
Add in over 55s to some of that at least!
Thank you so much for this. What a discussion.
Isn't it? You're so right about the mindset – the wheel of fortune turns...