Christmas shopping crowds, Alabama, 1941.
Yes.
Today provides a really interesting example of global tensions in all sorts of things, consumerism and anti-consumerism among them.
In the United States today is often called "Black Friday", as its the day of the year a lot of businesses make a profit for the first time in a year, i.e., go into the black. That's because of Christmas shopping. A lot of people (not me) who have this day off use it to go to post Thanksgiving Day sales for Christmas.
It'd be tempting to decry this as a feature of the current era alone, but in truth Christmas shopping has been a huge deal for well over a century. Indeed the fact that this is so much the case belies the claims occasionally seen that consumerism didn't exist a century ago. It did.
What's new about Black Friday is the huge emphasis on a single day. That's come about in recent years.
And also coming about in recent years are reactions to that. In much of the Western world this day is also Buy Nothing Day, a day whose goals I'll observe simply by default.
Started as a protest against consumerism by an American family in 1968, Buy Nothing Day in that context is part of a larger Buy Nothing For Christmas movement. That no doubt in fact is an intellectual strike against consumerism, but it's also part of latent American puritanism which we've addressed here before. The Puritans were a joyless lot and opposed almost every public expression of fun (as we've noted before, they were not opposed to drinking, which a lot of their followers in later years have been, and they were very okay with private marital bedroom fun). They banned Christmas.
Something that urges people not to buy anything for Christmas at all and to just give gifts that don't involve purchasing are basically urging people to give nothing for Christmas at all, as people don't really have the time or skills in the modern world to knit socks for something for Christmas. Hence the joyless Puritan goal would be achieved, I suspect, and people observing it can accordingly be self smug about it.
Taking another approach is Small Business Saturday which always falls the day after Black Friday. The goal of it is to have people shop locally. It's goal is a consumerist one, but sort of a distributist consumerist one.
Black Friday now coincides with something called Green Friday, which appears to have varying goals depending upon where you are. For some, it's simply the first day of a weekend of environmental activism. For others, in other places, it's focused on sustainable, hence green, products.
In Ireland, however, it's a day to shop local, like Small Business Saturday, but within Ireland. I.e., it coincides with Black Friday, but with a "shop local" emphasis.
One of the interesting things about all of this is how its all hinged on American Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving Day in the United States is morphed from the European Catholic tradition of giving thanks for the fall harvest. Nothing consumerist about it at all. It survived the reformation no doubt in part because the very early Church of England simply carried forward, nearly intact, the Catholic faith although that didn't last long and was falling apart by the time Queen Elizabeth I took office. The overall surprising thing is that it survived the Puritans, which makes a person suspect that its somewhat disorganized nature didn't put in in their scopes for elimination. It was, and really remains, a pretty simple holiday and even now most people grasp that they're giving thanks for something.
The big consumer launch that follows Thanksgiving is sort of a calendar accident that has taken place simply due to when American Thanksgiving is. Other countries that still observe something like Thanksgiving don't have the same calendar date, of course. Indeed, the American date floated around for years. Canada's Thanksgiving, for example, is in October. Their harvest is also in October. German Erntedankfest is the fist Sunday of October. Poles have their Święto Dziękczynienia but it's been put on top of Thanksgiving in the US. Most countries had a Thanksgiving Day that was largely the same as the original American one, although quite a few no longer do. In a lot of countries that retain one, it's a day on their local liturgical calendar that falls on a Sunday.
It says something about American consumer muscle that Black Friday is something that exists clean across the globe now. Europeans who are observing a Buy Nothing Friday or a Green Friday (outside of the Irish example), are noting and participating, in some fashion, in an post American Thanksgiving economic boost even if Thanksgiving is foreign to their calendars in the American sense. It's another example of how American culture, and even counter culture, have become so dominant.
