How about calling Halloween a “harvest/fall celebration” or Christmas being called X-mas.
I prefer to call halloween Samhain, myself.
Because Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas are all harvest festivals. Just depends on your climate.
The day itself is called Fat Tuesday in the Gulf Coast area, because “Mardi Gras” is used to refer to Carnival in general. It has a specific meaning. If you don’t have any ties to the cultural trappings surrounding it and you’re not talking about going down to NOLA for Fat Tuesday, OK, whatever. It’d be obnoxiously nitpicky to insist the day had to be called Mardi Gras in a place where the entirety of Carnival has been slapped with that label, though.
They get invited to the right parties! 
When I was younger, I recall the news always touting the day after Thanksgiving as the busiest shopping day of the year. Black Friday as a name for that day came along fairly recently.
I can understand staying away from the mall, the big-box stores, etc.
But since you brought up groceries, what’s the deal there? Grocery stores tend to be, if anything, a bit quieter than usual on the day after Thanksgiving. First of all, the time to avoid grocery stores is on the two days before Thanksgiving, when everybody’s buying stuff for T-day dinner; second, everybody who had T-day dinner at their place probably has a ton of leftovers and is in no hurry to go grocery shopping; and third, if they’re shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, they’re probably at the sorts of stores that have Black Friday sales, leaving the grocery stores mercifully uncrowded, yet normally staffed.
The Firebug and I went grocery shopping yesterday afternoon, and were in and out of there in no time flat.
Or (in the case of Turkey Day and Fat Tuesday, at least) maybe they’re trying, as broadcasters quite sensibly will, to avoid using the same word over and over again. Synonyms are good. When come back, bring alternatives.
In the case of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these really are the only names we have for these pseudo-events. (“The Day After Thanksgiving” is a bit unwieldy for broadcast purposes, and doesn’t point to the retailing aspect of the day in particular.)
Depends on where you are, I suppose. Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends are when the public and community swimming pools open and close in much of the country. If you’re looking for a better unofficial definition of summer than “when it’s warm enough to go swimming,” I can’t think of one.
It’s the official definitions of the seasons, in terms of the solstices and equinoxes, that reek.
Yes, this one’s hideous, one of the lesser atrocities of the Bush Administration. There’s nothing patriotic about 3,000 of your fellow citizens getting killed by terrorists. If an American city ever gets nuked, would we call that “SuperDuper Wave-That-Flag Patriot Day”?
They should have taken their cue from the historical precedent of the attack on Pearl Harbor. No cutesy nicknames, just “a day that will live in infamy.”
At least “Patriot Day” hasn’t caught on, either with the general public or with retailers.
It’s just part of my general response to all the Black Friday/Xmas shopping season nonsense. It’s also because I want to clean out my pantry and fridge, and since I don’t do Lent, this is a good time for me to do it.
I’m inspired now. This Chistmas I’m telling my kids were celebrating:
Santa isn’t Real Day.
And on Easter:
Zombie Jesus Day.
Over here in Oz while I am waiting for the Chrissie hols to start Iam making pressies for the whole family.
Who knows, you just might. Good reason for staying home that day, if you needed another one.
The ad industry didn’t invent the name “Black Friday”, they just bullshitted everybody after the name escaped to try to make people believe they did. “Black Friday” was in use at least as early as 1966 (that’s the year the term first appeared in a newspaper). It was coined by Philadelphia police officers to describe the chaos in Center City on the day after Thanksgiving. It seems to have started spreading out of Philly sometime in the '70s, first among retail workers who found the dark humor of the term summed up their feelings about the day pretty well, and then among shoppers and among news people desperate for a story on what is usually a pretty dull news day. In the late 1980s, the retail and advertising industries started pushing some hogwash about this being the day that retailers see their balance sheets go “into the black”, but this is unadulterated horse hockey.
In fact, proving your point, flodnak, we now have a sighting from 1961 mentioning a joint effort by Philadelphia downtown merchants and a city official, who also happened to be a public-relations executive, to change the names of “Black Friday” and “Black Saturday” to “Big Friday” and “Big Saturday.” Ulimately, that campaign failed. Two things are important about this, I think.
Aside from reiterating that retailers had nothing to do with the coining of “Black Friday” and pointing out that they were doing their best to get rid of the nickname, this piece is a strong indicator that, somewhere down the road, rebranding “Black Friday” (since a name change didn’t work) and then embracing a rehabilated “Black Friday” would be the twin approaches to take. It’d be great to discover the Don Draper who came up with this “whitewash” strategy, which is the one that worked.
Additionally, of note is that Denny Griswold, then editor and publisher of Public Relations Newsletter (which went on to become PR News), is (so far) our earliest source for a printed usage of “Black Friday.” (She was also the publishing partner and widow of Glenn Griswold, who had headed up Business Week.) Now, here in 2011, I find it interesting that the late public-relations icon and a 50-year-old public-relations blurb have had a hand in unraveling what had proven a pretty successful public-relations campaign.
C’est une bonne idée!
('Cause if you say it out loud, it sounds like “bunn ee day”…)
Sorry, but that is the way I remember it…pardon me whilst I impale you with my screwdriver!!!
We call it Autumn aswell (U.K.), and you’ve pretty much said what I was going to say.
I remember in 2001 I said “I’ll bet they’ll call this day something stupid, like Patriot Day”. I wish we’d had YouTube back then because I’d have put it into posterity.
So what are your feelings on Xmyth?
My dad always called it “Amateur Night.”
Never heard of Cyber Monday.