In the 1942 Bing Crosby/Fred Astaire movie Holiday Inn, there is a now-obscure joke in one of the film’s calendar sequences in which, during the month of November, a frantic, animated turkey darts back and forth between two successive Thursdays. This was based on a brouhaha caused by President Franklin Roosevelt when, in 1939, he moved the date of Thanksgiving up one week. The holiday itself dates from 1863 and Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of a national day of thanksgiving to be observed in November and which, by tradition, ended up as the last Thursday of the month. But there’s no tradition like a new tradition, and in 1939, there happened to be five Thursdays in November, which meant fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Retailers successfully lobbied FDR to move Thanksgiving up a week to extend the shopping season, and the resulting “Franksgiving” was observed on the fourth Thursday—not the last Thursday of the month. Not everyone was happy about this (sports teams, amongst others, had already made Thanksgiving plans well in advance of the change—and let’s not even talk about the calendar printers), so there was a bit of a backlash. Some state governors refused to go along with the change, so in effect there were two Thanksgivings in 1939, which was perhaps bad news for those trying to diet. Gotta give FDR credit for trying to help out retailers—even if the execution wasn’t all that well thought out. Trouble was, it didn’t even boost retail sales all that much either.

Retail and Thanksgiving have only become more inextricably linked in the 78 years since, and although the unfortunate term “Black Friday” has a negative etymology, it has come to refer to the often carnage-laden Friday after Thanksgiving. This year, as CNN Money reports, Black Friday sales boomed. Note, however, that this only applies to online sales. Says the article:

Early estimates from ShopperTrak, a data analytics company that measures the number of shoppers at stores, said foot traffic “decreased less than one percent when compared to Black Friday 2016.”