This time of year the holiday spirit is in air. If you turn on the radio, there are already plenty of Christmas songs playing on various stations. If you turn on the TV, there are Christmas movies, cartoons, themed shows being shown. Not to mention the plethora of commercials, ads and plenty of deals how you can spend your money faster. This is all standard operating procedure but you would almost have to be forgiven to remember that Thanksgiving is still an actual holiday these days.
It’s become a running cliché to say that Christmas comes earlier every year but it’s also a cliché based on fact. When I was a kid, the Christmas ‘season’ use to officially start the day after Thanksgiving! People use to wait to kick off their holiday shopping and decorating when the turkey was eaten, football games were over and the last Macy balloon float passed down Sixth Avenue in New York. It was a tradition to countdown to Thanksgiving and then spend the day after that to prepares and celebrate Christmas.
Not anymore!
These days Christmas seems to start right after Halloween. The stores literally clear the Halloween shelves and replace candy and costumes with Christmas cards, decorations and toys. People are putting up lights and trees sooner. Santa even arrives at the mall earlier. Thanksgiving has almost become an afterthought. Not hard to figure out why. Christmas is big business and it seems to only get bigger every year. Last year stores made $590 billion in sales for the season, which was actually considered disappointing from the previous year.
So stores are trying harder to get those holiday dollars by opening sooner, even on Thanksgiving Day itself! Black Friday isn’t even enough anymore. It used to be all stores were closed that day but that has changed the last few years. In fact last year 35 million Americans quickly gobbled their turkey and went shopping on Thanksgiving even though they have weeks to shop after that.
This year they expect more people out shopping and more stores like Macy’s, GAP, Wal-mart, K-mart, Staples (yes Staples) will be open with 1 million workers who will also be spending their Thanksgiving on a retail floor than at home with their families. In fact, there is now a new name for the new shopping day—Brown Thursday. I remembered when it was called Thanksgiving!
The corporate and consumer nature of the holiday has cornered Christmas so much it finds ways to extend the shopping period as much as possible to where Thanksgiving is becoming a distraction. However it’s still an important time of year for millions of families to just be thankful for what they have and honored it as such. There will still be 27 more shopping days left!
By: Felix Cooper
Guest Contributor
ReelUrbanNews.com
