Spin Control: Black Friday can last weeks. Is nothing sacred?

We are in the midst of holiday season, when it is traditional for columnists to complain about one holiday not getting enough attention or another getting the wrong kind of attention.

We are past Halloween, on the brink of Thanksgiving, with Hanukkah, solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa and New Year’s just over the horizon. With so many special days packed together at year’s end, one might be tempted to just say “Happy Holidays” for the next five weeks, were it not for the likely opprobrium from those eager to take arms against the so-called “war on Christmas.”

On the flip side, Thanksgiving falls so late this year that Christmas decorations have been going up for several weeks. That has prompted some to complain – as always happens when the calendar is so aligned – that Thanksgiving is not receiving the proper attention in the rush toward a Holly Jolly Feliz Navidad.

How dare people give short shrift to a day originally set aside for prayerful gratitude, which has become an opportunity for conspicuous consumption of food, because of the rush toward a day set aside to mark the birth of a major religious figure, which has become an opportunity for conspicuous consumption of everything else?

No one, however, seems to have noticed the devaluing of another special day on the American calendar of events: Black Friday.

The day after Thanksgiving, which was once the traditional start of the Christmas shopping season, was celebrated with predawn excursions to malls and department stores, where anxious shoppers stood in lines – sometimes in freezing temperatures and snow, considering it was late November – to get special deals on clothes, toys, appliances and electronics.

They sipped lattes and hot cocoa, munched on donuts and were filled with holiday cheer as they waited for the doors to open. Because the number of supersale items was limited, however, when the doors opened, the shoppers sometimes flooded through the stores in a scene comparable to Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.

Black Friday was said to be the day when many retailers’ accounts went from losses, or in the red, to profits, or in the black. It was said to be the bellwether of the holiday shopping season, and economists would be interviewed on the news that night, and on talking head shows on that Sunday, about what it portended for the nation’s economy.

In anticipation of Black Friday, many newspapers had their largest edition of the year on Thanksgiving Day, filled with local department store ads inside the news sections, and stuffed with colorful inserts from national retailers. It was a chance for stores to catch the attention of potential Black Friday shoppers who took to the couch after the tryptophan caught up with them from their turkey dinner.

In the 1980s when I began working at The Spokesman-Review, Black Friday ads, with their one-day-only bargains, swelled the newspaper to as many as 200 pages. By comparison, last Thanksgiving’s S-R was 48 pages, including the six-page color insert from Big 5 Sporting Goods.

Editors saved up stories for weeks to fill in the space around the ads. Young reporters without enough seniority to have both Thursday and Friday off were sent out to cover the crowds. They would also talk to someone from a retail establishment late in the afternoon, who would always say sales were good and the day was the harbinger of a great holiday shopping season.

Santa usually didn’t show up in the department stores and malls until Black Friday, another nod to the separation between the two holidays.

Black Friday could be crazy. It could be surprising. It could be intense. It could occasionally be painful for people trampled in the crush.

But it was always just one day.

There were some spin-offs, like Small Business Saturday that many cities instituted to help local merchants. Online retailers countered with Cyber Monday in 2005.

Black Friday has now been appropriated by anyone hoping to sell lots of things over a flexible period of time.

Some examples that showed up recently in my mailbox or inbox: A national electronics retailer held a Black Friday sale from Wednesday through Saturday last week, so at least there was a Friday in there. Earlier this month, an ad for a local hardware store proclaimed a Black Friday sale stretching from Nov. 19 to Dec. 1. A travel booking website sent out an email ad announcing a Black Friday sale that went from Nov.20 through Dec. 2. One of its competitors countered the next day with a Cyber Week sale.

In true American fashion, Black Friday sales are likely to creep earlier and earlier into the year. Someday when you see Halloween candy on the shelves in August and pumpkin spice lattes being advertised just after Labor Day, you’ll know that Black Friday sales aren’t far behind.