STRAIGHT ANSWER MA'AM

Now that the turkey, dressing, sweet potato casserole, and green beans have been eaten, it's time to go shopping or lie on the couch and watch another football game.

Here is a history of the term "Black Friday."

Q: Where did the idea of "Black Friday" come from? I don't remember it being a thing when I was growing up.

Answer: The concept of "Black Friday" as we know it now was apparently not in common usage as recently as the mid-1980s.

There is an urban legend that "Black Friday" had its origins in the slave trade in the 1800s, but that has no basis in fact. The very first recorded use of "Black Friday," according to History.com , referred to a crash in the U.S. gold market in 1869, and then another in 1873.

As early as 1951, the phrase had been used to describe the trend of people calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving so they could have a four-day weekend, according to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, Snopes.com .

According to a 1951 publication called Factory Management and Maintenance, "'Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis' is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects. At least that's the feeling of those who have to get production out, when the 'Black Friday' comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick — and can prove it."

And in the 1950s and '60s, Philadelphia police used Black Friday "to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year," according to History.com . "Not only would Philly cops not be able to take the day off , but they would have to work extra-long shifts dealing with the additional crowds and traffic."

A 1975 New York Times article referred to Philadelphia's "Black Friday" as regional slang, saying it was used by police and bus drivers. Merchants tried to change the phrase to "Big Friday" to remove negative connotations, but it remained a regional concept for many years.

"Sometime in the late 1980s, however, retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers."

The result was the apocryphal notion that stores that had been operating at a loss ("in the red") would earn their first profits and go "in the black" on the Friday after Thanksgiving because of heavy shopping, and that it was the biggest shopping day of the year.

"In fact, stores traditionally see bigger sales on the Saturday before Christmas," History.com notes.

Still, "The Black Friday story stuck," according to the site, "and pretty soon the term's darker roots in Philadelphia were largely forgotten. Since then, the one-day sales bonanza has morphed into a four-day event and spawned other 'retail holidays' such as Small Business Saturday/Sunday and Cyber Monday."

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