The Magic of the Season: From Turkey to Rollercoaster Spending in 72 Hours.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, one of the major holidays in the US calendar. I hope you had a wonderful day and the combined weight of your family dinner plates didn’t cause structural problems for your dining table. The story and origins of the holiday are well known. As you wake up this morning and into the dawn of the retail extravaganza that’s known as Black Friday and its contemporary, Cyber Monday, have you given any thoughts about their origin story?

Black Friday’s is considerably less heartwarming than Thanksgiving. The term allegedly emerged in Philadelphia during the 1960s, coined by police officers who dreaded the chaotic day after Thanksgiving when hordes of shoppers and tourists would flood the city ahead of the Army-Navy football game. Retailers initially disliked the term before eventually rebranding it as the day when stores finally moved from being “in the red” to “in the black”, a more palatable story about profitability rather than chaos. What began as a localized shopping event has since transformed into a cultural event that now kicks off weeks before the actual football game.

Cyber Monday is the even younger sibling in this duo of commercial holidays, born in 2005 when the National Retail Federation noticed a spike in online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving. The reasoning was simple: people returned to their office computers with faster internet connections than they had at home and used their lunch breaks to snag deals they’d missed over the weekend. It’s rather fun to think about it now, given that we all carry supercomputers in our pockets with speeds that would have seemed like science fiction back then. Yet the tradition stuck, and now both days serve as bookends to a shopping weekend that’s become as much a part of the holiday season as turkey, stuffing and indigestion tablets.

And so we once again enter that great financial high-wire balancing act that defines the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Your credit card sits in your wallet, practically humming with nervous energy, knowing full well it’s about to get quite the workout over the coming weeks. There’s an almost inevitability to it all, gift lists multiplied by shipping deadlines, divided by whatever’s left in the checking account after yesterday’s feast.

You tell ourselves I’ll be sensible this year, that we’ll stick to budgets and make thoughtful, affordable choices. Yet somehow, come January, we’ll find ourselves staring at statements and wondering how exactly we convinced ourselves that Aunt Linda absolutely needed that premium cheese-of-the-month subscription. The juggling act is real, the plates are spinning, and we’ve got about four weeks to keep them all in the air before we can collapse into the new year and pretend we meant to do it all along.

To paraphrase that seasonal movie: happy holidays, have a fiscally responsible spending period…ya filthy animals.