Meanwhile, shootings were reported in Northern California, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Iowa; brawls broke out in New York, Arizona, and Ohio among others; a young girl was trampled in Michigan; and chaotic, frenzied scenes were widespread across the nation. How did it get to this point? How did the day after Thanksgiving morph into the unhinged quasi-holiday known as “Black Friday”?

Despite the valiant efforts of multiple generations of historians, most Americans still speciously assume Thanksgiving to be a largely unbroken American tradition that spans four centuries from the Pilgrim’s bountiful feast with the Wampanoag Indians to our contemporary football-infused turkey holocaust. To be sure, days of thanksgiving were observed frequently in many American colonies and during the early republic, but they were less bountiful celebrations of abundance than they were ascetic days of fasting and prayer. Most of the “traditional” Thanksgiving we celebrate today, from the food to its mythical origin story, was in fact the creation of mid-nineteenth-century moral reformer Sarah Josepha Hale. Within her widely read magazine Godey’s Lady Book, Hale promoted the potential holiday as a means through which the nation could gather, celebrate, and model loving ties and moral life for the nation. After decades of unsuccessful lobbying, and with the help of Abraham Lincoln, Hale succeeded in creating a national holiday as a mechanism to help reunite the nation after the tumult of the Civil War. The idea spread quickly and by the beginning of the twentieth century, Thanksgiving was widely celebrated throughout the North (Southerners initially distrusted it as a “Yankee holiday”), second only to Christmas.

Thanksgiving developed during a period in which, as historian Leigh Eric Schmidt has shown, most American holidays became thoroughly consumer-oriented, which was particularly true of Christmas. To a certain extent, of course, this applied to Thanksgiving, not only in its focus on certain foods, but also in its strong tie to American football. Indeed, already by 1893, one columnist could grump that “Thanksgiving Day is no longer a solemn festival to God for mercies given… It is a holiday granted by the State and Nation to see a game of football.” Yet, suggests Matthew Dennis, Thanksgiving was simultaneously (though however imperfectly) an expression of Americans’ growing ambivalence or even “aversion to commercialization and capitalist excess,” particularly in its de-emphasis on gift-giving and the simple preindustrial vision of America it celebrates. As a result, even in the nineteenth-century, it was considered in poor taste for retailers to begin the holiday shopping season until after Thanksgiving. In 1924, Macy’s created its annual Thanksgiving Day Parade to mark the transition into the Christmas shopping season. So the day after Thanksgiving has served as the transition into the Christmas shopping season for nearly as long as there have been Thanksgivings.

In fact, by 1939, this tradition had become so firmly entrenched that it precipitated one of the great and largely-forgotten political scandals of the twentieth-century: Franksgiving. Locked in the midst of the Great Depression, and with Thanksgiving falling on November 30^th and therefore allowing a particularly short holiday season, Roosevelt acted on the advice of national retailers and—in an effort to boost the national economy—moved Thanksgiving ahead to provide an extra week of shopping days. The decision was widely panned, with over sixty percent of Americans disapproving (in large part because it screwed up football games scheduled for Thanksgiving). An Indiana shopkeeper protested with a sign in his window reading, “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas,” while the Oklahoma attorney general wrote:

 “Thirty days hath September,

April June and November

All the rest have thirty-one.

Until we hear from Washington”

The unpopular decision resulted in a joint Congressional resolution designating the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which Roosevelt signed into law in 1941.

If the day after Thanksgiving has marked the rather abrupt transition into the Christmas shopping season, and been one of the busiest retail days of the year, since the nineteenth-century, it only became associated with the name “Black Friday” during the 1960s, when Philadelphia police officers and bus drivers used it to refer to the traffic jams and crowded sidewalks resulting when mobs of shoppers descended into downtown stores. The term spread slowly across the United States until it began capturing some national exposure and a double-meaning, reflected in a 1982 ABC News World News Tonight Broadcast: “Some merchants label the day after Thanksgiving ‘Black Friday,’ because business today can mean the difference between red ink and black on the ledgers.”

Yet, despite the often frenzied atmosphere and outside a few cultish die-hards who camped outside stores in advance of mostly normal openings, Black Friday remained a largely normal shopping day into the mid-1990s. By 1995 and 1996, however, the term “Black Friday” appears to have become a massive marketing campaign itself, used extensively in national advertisements and covered with increasing vigor by the news media, thus precipitating the ongoing race to the bottom we see today. In an effort simply to draw consumers into stores, corporations began advertising lower and lower sale prices each year of limited-supply items in an effort to encourage more and more people to camp outside earlier and earlier, actively cultivating an atmosphere of sport and competition.

By 2005, this manufactured frenzy began turning particularly violent—beyond the already widespread pushing and shoving—as companies began opening their doors even earlier while offering even lower prices and more short-supplied items like Wal-Mart’s $300 computer. In 2006, widespread violence was reported as consumers waited for the PlayStation 3, of which there was a worldwide shortage. As the New York Times noted at the time, “Many merchants angered shoppers by trumpeting huge discounts—like $70 portable DVD players and $600 flat-screen televisions—only to announce they were sold out moments after they opened.”

Then, in 2007, Jdimytai Damour was killed in a stampede of 2,000 customers who managed to break down the doors of a New York Wal-Mart at 4:55 in the morning, trapping him in a vestibule where he died of asphyxiation. A temporary employee working at a company infamous for low wages and poor benefits, Damour spent the evening with his family before rushing off to guard a “blitz” line for a “door-busting” sale, only to be trampled by a frantic mob of consumers, many of whom reacted in anger when informed that the store would be closing and continued to shop. Although many Americans expressed horror and anger and Damour’s senseless death, it precipitated few cultural changes or even much sympathy for the underpaid workers forced to endure such madness.

This year, when many of the major American retailers opened at midnight, it drew significant pushback from their disempowered employees. Although one petition to stop the decision received 190,000 signatures, most Americans appeared to adopt a stance similar to the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s: be grateful you have a job—you’re free to quit if you don’t like it. To suggest that workers with little economic security, and who are faced with daunting unemployment rates, are “free” to quit is, of course, a bizarre and elaborate fiction. To suggest that corporations should have the right to make any unreasonable demand they please from workers living in a state of such unfreedom is a disturbing reminder of how far Americans have strayed from the principles of charity and compassion the season is alleged to represent.  It is only very recently, then, that Black Friday has taken on its third meaning as the darkest day in the American calendar.

Oh, and for anyone who thinks they're part of the solution by shopping online.