Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26 this year, which puts Black Friday on November 27. Two things about this weekend are widely misunderstood: why the day has that name, and why Thanksgiving lands where it does.
The tidy story that is not quite true
You may have heard that retailers call it Black Friday because stores finally move from the red (losses) to the black (profit) on the books. It makes a neat accounting story, but historians trace the name somewhere else. In the 1960s, police in Philadelphia used "Black Friday" for the day after Thanksgiving, when crowds of shoppers and tourists in town for the Army-Navy football game snarled traffic and made officers' jobs miserable. The phrase spread beyond the city over the following years.
Retailers did not love a name that sounded like a disaster. The red-to-black explanation arrived later and put a more flattering spin on it, and by the 1980s it had caught on nationally.
The year Thanksgiving was moved
Thanksgiving has not always been on the fourth Thursday. Presidents proclaimed it each year, and Abraham Lincoln set the last Thursday of November during the Civil War. In 1939, November had five Thursdays, which would have put Thanksgiving on the 30th. Retailers worried the short stretch before Christmas would hurt sales, so President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week to the 23rd.
Not everyone went along. Some states followed the new date and some kept the old one, and families found themselves celebrating on different Thursdays. Critics mockingly called the new date "Franksgiving." Congress settled it in 1941 by passing a law that made Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of November, which is the rule that still applies today.
A tip for the shopping weekend
A big discount is only a deal if the starting price was real. Before you buy, check the item's price over the past few weeks using a price tracker or a store's own history, compare it with a competitor, and decide your budget before you open the app. If a "limited time" countdown pressures you, remember that most sales repeat before the holidays.
Today's useful detail: Black Friday began as police slang for a traffic nightmare in Philadelphia, and Thanksgiving has been fixed on the fourth Thursday only since 1941.
