The Forgotten Holiday

This week, across America families will gather and enjoy the traditional Thanksgiving feast of Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and the rest. With its roots in harvest festivals conducted by the earliest European settlers in North America, our modern Thanksgiving is a uniquely American tradition.

But as traditions go, Thanksgiving has in recent years become the major holiday that retailers have decided to ignore. Retailing now moves from the pumpkins and goblins of Halloween directly to the reindeer and sleighs of Christmas. There appears to be no room for turkeys and Pilgrims.

As recently as the 1970s, the decorations and marketing themes seen in stores would be Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas. The Christmas season had a quasi-official kickoff day, the day still often referred to as Black Friday. When the stores all opened on the Friday after Thanksgiving, their bright Christmas decorations would suddenly be in place.

Black Friday, by the way, is called that not because of some dire event such as the Black Tuesday associated with the 1929 stock market crash. Nor does there appear to be any substance to the theory that the day is so named because the day after Thanksgiving is so busy for retailers that it "puts them in the black." We first heard the term during our college years when a fellow student had a part-time job at Macy's, and she considered the term to be rooted in the dread the store employees had for the day.

Many of the police departments served by The Badge Company must make special preparations for the crush of traffic that occurs on this day.

But now the Christmas decorations appear well before Thanksgiving, with the result that two things have been lost: Any retail celebration of Thanksgiving, and any excitement connected to the start of the Christmas season.

We do not know whether there are marketing experts who, after studying the buying habits of consumers, have determined that flattening Thanksgiving with the steamroller of Christmas marketing truly results in greater holiday sales. But we doubt that it makes that much of a difference. Yes, consumers are greatly influenced by advertising and marketing, but does the presence of lighted trees in the stores and Karen Carpenter singing Merry Christmas, Baby on the Muzak in early November really cause people to spend more than they otherwise would over the course of the season?

All we know is that we miss the Thanksgiving decorations, and we miss the colorful start to the Christmas season that used to take place on Black Friday. And we are becoming fearful for Halloween, as it may be next. We have seen some Christmas decorations appearing in October.