Thanksgiving as the start of the Christmas shopping season goes back at least to the depression days of 1939, when Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week. The late holiday that year would shorten the holiday shopping season, and Roosevelt believed more time to shop would help the economy.The stock market had crashed ten years earlier and the recovery had stalled. But FDR's move was unpopular, and some dubbed the new holiday Franksgiving.
The term Black Friday would have been familiar in FDR's time to mean a market crash. Not until the 1960s did it come to mean the day after Thanksgiving.
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