Thanksgiving in the United States is increasingly overshadowed by Black Friday’s commercialism.  While the commercial connection between Christmas and Thanksgiving goes back a while, the ascent of commercialism (together with historical revisionism) is destroying Americans’ awareness of the roots of their holidays.

Constraining Thanksgiving Commercialism

In “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Lucy deplores the commercialization of Christmas, tellingly assuring us “We all know Christmas is a big commercial racket.  It’s ruined by a big Eastern syndicate, ya know.”

Criticizing the commercialization of Christmas is standard holiday fare.  But the truth is: it’s bleeding into Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving has always had some commercial nexus.  Being so close to Christmas and with many families enjoying a long Thanksgiving weekend, there’s always been some association between the two holidays.  For many towns, the Thanksgiving weekend was a chance for Santa Claus to arrive on town squares or store thrones, an opportunity for cities and villages to turn on their Christmas decorations and maybe even put up a Christmas Tree for later official lighting.  

The commercial nexus isn’t even that new: it goes back more than four score years!  Up until 1939, Americans observed Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November.  But that could be as late as November 29 or 30, as it was that year, leaving a bit over three weeks till Christmas.  Wanting to get Americans out of Depression doldrums, FDR switched Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November, giving retailers a little extra time cushion to sell their wares.

Of course, we now speak of “Black Friday” (intended to keep sellers in the black rather than red).  “Black Friday” has proliferated into multiple sales and spending days, urging Americans to buy local, buy cyber, donate to charity… in short, loosen their purse strings. 

But perhaps the most invidious seepage of commercialization into Thanksgiving has been the creep into Thanksgiving itself. 

Once upon a time, “Black Friday” started a little earlier on Friday morning.  Gradually, kickoff time got earlier and earlier until some stores were opening at midnight. 

But to open to customers at midnight means staff needs to be there earlier, i.e., on Thanksgiving itself.  And that staff isn’t the CEOs or even the green eyeshade accountant types measuring the black ink.  It’s typically the shift floor workers, earning minimum wage or a little more, who are expected to report.

About a decade ago, a number of cities and towns began pushing back, adopting ordinances banning opening on Thanksgiving and/or requiring store workers to show up for work on Thanksgiving night.  Shamed by their lust for lucre, some national chains made clear they would not open in the middle of the night and make their employees work.  Others shamelessly touted their customer readiness.

Let’s not even go back into the true origins of Thanksgiving, a celebration of gratitude to God for human survival.  Of the 100-some people who sailed left England aboard the Mayflower in 1620, only about half were left a year later when the Pilgrims marked their first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts.  After a rough winter, having unexpectedly landed in a wilderness and then ravaged by disease and malnutrition, the survivors had brought in the sheaves of their first harvest of crops they learned to plant from the local peoples.  The pattern of the first Thanksgiving was one of religious gratitude.

Over time, Thanksgiving assumed not just a religious but a domestic character: the family gathered around the family dinner table, a roast turkey in their midst.  It’s the image of multiple smiling generations around the dining room table as grandmother brings in the turkey, captured in Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want,” one of his famous “Four Freedoms” posters published in the middle of World War II.  In that poster, Rockwell fuses history and memory: the celebration of Thanksgiving as a quintessential American feast with the warm reminiscences of family altogether.

Isn’t that what most Americans “remember” about Thanksgiving?  How many people remember the family at the Thanksgiving table?  Compare that with how many even remember what they bought on Black Friday, even Black Friday 2022.

Americans are being progressively cheated of their history from two ends.  One is historical revisionism.  “Critical” approaches to history undermine any shared narrative, certainly any narrative shared with pride.  Does the “1620 Project,” the idea of people braving coming to a New World in the name of religious freedom, gain any of the traction the ersatz “1619 Project” (claiming American history starts with the slave trade) receives? 

The other factor eating away at our history is rank commercialism.  With the possible exception of the Fourth of July, almost every other American holiday is characterized less today by a shared history than a sale.  Do Americans reflect on the abiding significance of George Washington, or do they buy sheets at the Presidents’ Day Sale?  Is one even allowed to admit pride in Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, or is that holiday to be effaced, its meaning celebrated by the earliest appearance of Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas merchandise?  Does memory of sacrifice on Memorial Day compete with “get-into-summer” sales, awareness of the achievements of organized labor with “back-to-school” sales? 

Have the distinguishing marks of many American holidays become some amorphous awareness “I bought something on X?”

Recovering American history requires recovering American memory, both of events gone by as well as times shared together, especially as families.  That means tempering creeping commercialism eating away at our holidays, our heritage, and our faith.

Otherwise, we’ll just adopt Shania Twain’s credo: “Our religion is to go and blow it all/So we’re shopping every Sunday at the mall.”

Ka-ching!

Image: AFP Image Forum