In the parlance of shopping, “Black Friday” is the name attached to the day after Thanksgiving.

Since 1939 in the USA, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. Traditionally, Thanksgiving Thursday has itself been a day for stores to be closed to the commercial activities of business and homes to be open to the business of familial activities, a day for relatives and friends to gather, eat and relax. The next day, the Friday after Thanksgiving, has also traditionally been in the States a holiday from going to work and an opportunity for going to shop. Thanksgiving Friday is the day to wake up from rest and head out to the shops before the rest are there first and grab the best presents. As the gamers say, “The early bird catches the latest technology.”

The race is on, and a race it has been — for some years now.

In 1961, the rush of Thanksgiving Friday overtook the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The City of Brotherly love did not that day bear the image of its name. Downtown department stores were mobbed from daybreak to long after nightfall with invigorated shoppers reaching and wrestling for bargains. Intersections were jammed with cars, their horns honking and tires screeching as drivers waved their hands into the chilly air. Heavy-packaged crowds elbowed through and between each other, pushing onto the streets and between the stalled traffic. The Philadelphia Police Department had had enough. The officers blew their whistles and muttered and moaned under their breaths: “Black Friday!” The name stuck. A new term was coined that day for a new event.

In years after, the more kind of mind and pure of speech argued: “Black Friday is too negative a term to attach to such a noble endeavor as the pursuit of holiday treasure. Instead, let us call the day ‘Big Friday.’” Fat chance of that. To the throngs of shoppers, the term Black Friday had acquired too nice a ring to be left behind. More clear-headed minds attempted a different tactic: “Let’s rehabilitate the terminology,” the students of economics said. “We meant ‘black’ in the accounting sense of the word, to represent the effect of sales moving a merchant from the red ink of loss to the black ink of profit.” Who were they kidding? The police knew what they were facing as did the drivers in their cars and the shoppers on the streets. The day is ‘black’ because of the joyous madhouse of unrestrained consumption that threatens to unravel the infrastructure of modern civilized notion. The frenzy is a wild fiesta of manic merchandising unmatched in the history of mercantile madness. “We love you Black Friday,” the masses shout waiting for the doors of the Big Box stores to open. “We will not let them take your title away.” So, it seems, we are stuck with Black Friday.

In fact, the whole of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend seems labeled in term. The National Retail Federation defines “Black Friday weekend” to include Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and has reported, since 2005, the total spend by American consumers flooding the aisles and lanes of twinkling bliss. From 2005 to 2012, shoppers have spent more each year. Even in 2009, in the midst of recovering from recession, sales were up — if only slightly.

Not so this year. The numbers are in. The National Retail Federation estimates spending for 2013’s extended Black Friday weekend to be $57.4 billion, down 2.9 percent from a year ago — the first such drop in recorded spending history.

Explanations abound for this year’s reduction in sales. Suffice to say, there has been a change; and no one knows just why. Perhaps the more positive and semantically inclined are about to have their day. Perhaps Thanksgiving Friday is becoming less black, tamer, more restrained, respectable (as difficult as it is to attach that term to that day) and less exciting. Perhaps it will be just another big Friday, a good day of black ink, not the bad day of fun that blackened in scowling wonder the visages of the police officers of Philadelphia, PA. Perhaps Black Friday is naughty no longer, and the trafficked rush of past Thanksgivings is settling into a new and milder fashion.

Only time and the traffic guardians may know for sure, and they’re not saying as yet.

We’ll just have to wait for 2014’s big Friday and see if it will be Black.

Maybe, I’ll be waiting in line with you to find out.

It would be a first, for me.

Grandpa Jim