Starbucks’s cups become red, pumpkin pie becomes Christmas cookies, Michael Buble’s Christmas album fills our ears—it’s officially the holiday season. And as we prepare for the holidays, dreaming of decadent festivities and family time, we find ourselves singing, “Santa baby, I want a yacht and really that’s not a lot; Been an angel all year, Santa baby.” It’s the season of giving and (shamelessly) receiving. Yet, when did the holidays become so consumer driven? Has a historically religious holiday season become a commercialized excuse to drive the economy?
The consumer mindset of the holidays is nothing new. The primetime holiday shopping window of Thanksgiving to Christmas has been widely recognized since the 19th century. Yet, the extensive nature of holiday sales has been more prominent in the last century. The retail industry, salivating for mass sales, convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to push the Thanksgiving Holiday forward—to the third Thursday of the month, rather than the last. The retail industry was determined to spur the shopping season and squeeze out as most sales as they could. Despite this attempt, the new date failed in spurring shoppers, and the date was reversed in 1941.
Though the concept of Black Friday is relatively recent, with the term being coined in 1998, the days following Thanksgiving, up until Christmas, have been the most consumer-driven since the early 1800’s. This is due largely to the marketing of large department stores within the major cities: window displays.
Dating back to the earlier half of the 19th century, window displays became the main form of advertising for major department stores in major cities. Macy’s in New York City is regarded as the first department store to construct holiday presentations, including window displays, indoor decorations, and the “in-store Santa.” His 1874 window display, the first major holiday window, displayed a collection of porcelain dolls from around the world, as well as scenes from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” By the 1900’s, most large retailers in the United States had begun to participate in holiday window displays. A Time Magazine reporter in 1938 wrote, “All this not only added melody to Christmas shopping but made the Avenue’s 80,000 daily pedestrians acutely aware of an artistic rivalry which has begun to show signs of lustiness.”
Today, over a year’s planning is needed to plot the themes of the holiday windows. The process includes storyboards, auditions, and custom-commissioned pieces. Lord & Taylor’s window designer declares, “It’s no different than a small Broadway production. It’s very elaborate.” The windows have not only become a form of marketing, attempting to entice customers to overly spend, but have also become a holiday tradition. Department stores now use velvet lines to direct traffic into specifically viewing the window displays. Over 8 million people will find themselves drawn into these department stores this holiday season…probably buying gifts for you.
Read more on the history of holiday shopping:
http://time.com/3603622/fdr-moved-thanksgiving/
https://zady.com/features/the-history-of-department-store-holiday-window-displays