Did you give on Tuesday? Shop on Friday? Monday?

I cannot keep up

Starting after Thanksgiving, we have, in order, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday. So the pattern is spend-spend-spend-give.

(I suppose we...rest?...on Sunday?)

The phrase “Black Friday” first bubbled up on the day the price of gold plummeted in 1869. It took the economy with it. For that, let us blame the likes of this guy, though he had help. Gould et al. are mostly lost to the ages, but the phrase morphed into modern times as a description of the chaos when shoppers hit the stores the day after Thanksgiving. That morphing probably started in Philadelphia.

Small Business Sunday was initiated in 2010 by American Express, and why not have a credit card company push for more shopping, albeit at your local shoppes?

Cyber Monday harkens back to early interwebs shopping (circa 2005), when most people had slower internet connections at home than they did at work, so of course the National Retail Federation stepped in with a new sort-of holiday meant to acknowledge that a lot of us wrapped up our holiday shopping sitting at our desk, rather than committing anything like, oh, work.

Then, 10 years ago, there arrived Giving Tuesday, meant to cleanse the palate from all that consumerism. For this, we can thank Henry Timms, and you can learn more about that here.

So now we’re at Wednesday, and to my knowledge, it doesn’t have a name other than “Wednesday.” Shall we give it one? Baking Bread Wednesday? What-Have-I-Done Wednesday?