… is what we call the day after Thanksgiving … because it is the day on which retail businesses move from “red” to “black” in their annual ledgers of profits and losses.
Customers are enticed to shop on Black Friday by sales, discounts, debuts of new merchandise and other marketing gimmicks … and respond in hordes.
Oddly, the other best-known “Black” day of the week has a meaning diametrically opposed to that of Black Friday … this, of course, is Black Thursday …
… the day of the great Wall Street Stock Market crash in 1929 …
… this was another day which brought out hordes of people …
… though for different reasons … including a run on the banks …
… as people tried to withdraw their money before the banks collapsed … generally without success.
As an aside likely of interest to no one except me … I was born in Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and near where the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was published … and in the 1970’s, lived in Santa Ana … where the Santa Ana Register was published. The Brooklyn Eagle has long since passed into history … while the Register (now called the Orange County Register) remains the primary newspaper in Southern California’s most conservative county … and I now live in Northern California, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.
There are also lesser-known “black” days of the week … in fact, there is one for each other day … representing events of widely divergent meaning.
Black Monday, for example, has two meanings … one a mini-Black Thursday …
… which saw a major stock market fall in 1987 … and for you sports fans out there … Black Monday 2013 …
… when no fewer than 7 NFL head coaches …
… and a number of other team officials were summarily fired.
And we had a Black Tuesday …
… which marked the beginning of the 1929 stock market crash …
… that reached its historic crescendo two days later.
Not to be outdone, the United Kingdom joins our “black day” list with a stock market crash of its own …
… in 1992 … called Black Wednesday.
And, as for weekends, we also have a Black Saturday … this one in 2009 in Australia …
… a day which saw the start of a devastating series of wildfires in the state of Victoria in southeastern Australia.
Victoria is Australia’s most densely populated state … and home to the country’s 2nd biggest city, Melbourne. The fires which started on Black Sunday ultimately killed 173 people … injured 414 … burned 1,100,000 acres … destroyed 3500 buildings … and killed nearly 12,000 head of livestock.
Finally, we also have two versions of Black Sunday … one of which, fortunately, is fictitious. The real one happened in Oklahoma and Texas in 1935 … during the days of the infamous “dust bowl” … when monumental dust storms swept across parts of those states …
… displacing an estimated 300,000 TONS of topsoil …
… some of which ended up as far away as the East Coast of the United States.
The fictional terroristic Black Sunday was a book of that name by Thomas Harris …
… who is perhaps better-known as the author of “The Silence of the Lambs” … and creator of the character Hannibal Lecter. His terrorism book was also made into a blockbuster movie …
… starring Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern.
So, here’s hoping everyone who went shopping today had a good Black Friday … and that others, like myself … who wouldn’t have ventured out to a retail store today under any circumstances … had a nice quiet day at home!
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