Black Friday - A Tribute to Tragedy

Today is Black Friday, or, more accurately, Friday the 13th. When I got to work this morning, the discussion arose about whether the fact that it's Friday the 13th of February automatically makes it Black Friday. I was of the belief that Black Friday only occurred in a particular month (October?! August?!), and that other Friday the 13ths are still classified as unlucky, but don't necessarily receive the title.

I know Wikipedia is not always the most reliable source, but I did a wiki-search on the subject and found that Black Friday does not necessarily even refer to a Friday the 13th at all. In fact, it refers to countless Friday occurrences.

In America, for starters, it's the Friday after Thanksgiving and is actually classed as a "shopping day" because this is traditionally when shopping for the holiday season commences. Why is it called Black Friday? According to Wiki, the term originally described the traffic jams and overcrowded sidewalks on the day. In more recent years the term has been acquired by shop owners and accountants because those companies which may be operating in the red will make a profit in the holiday season. Thus, their books begin showing positive figures, which is shown by the black font replacing the red.

For the most part, however, Black Friday does refer to a tragedy or negative event that occurred on a Friday. There is a list of fifteen one-time events known as Black Friday. In my search to find whether Friday the 13th and Black Friday share a meaning, I looked through each of the items in the list. Largely the dates were Fridays that fell at other times of the month, and therefore not really relevant:

• Friday, 24 September 1869, aka the Fisk-Gould Scandal; a financial panic in the US.
• Friday, 14 October 1881, aka Eyemouth Disaster; 189 fishermen died.
• Friday, 31 January 1919, aka Bloody Friday and Battle of George Square; some 60,000 rioters on the streets of Scotland fight for a shorter working week.
• Friday, 8 September 1978; shooting of protesters in Zhaleh (or Jaleh) Square, Iran; "15,000 dead and wounded".

As interesting as these events may be, what I find more interesting is the number of Black Fridays which do occur on a Friday the 13th. Out of this list of fifteen, three events occurred on the 13th of the month, and two of these include a large number of fatalities.

Black Friday is the name that the Canadian Black Watch of the Royal Highland Regiment gave the 13th of October 1944. This day, which was during WWII's Battle of Scheldt in Belgium, saw the Regiment suffer 145 casualties and 56 deaths from attacking German positions in a beet field. There were also twenty-seven men taken prisoner, and a company of ninety men was reduced to only four survivors.

A little over 5 and a half years prior to this is the Black Friday which has become most relevant to Australia this week. On January 13th, 1939, a heatwave and careless burning contributed to bushfires which killed 71 people, destroyed several villages and burned a total of 2 million hectares of land in Victoria. Almost exactly seventy years later, history not only repeats itself, but competes for tragedy on a greater scale. It succeeds, with the Victorian bushfires having claimed at least 181 lives thus far, as well as burning 450k hectares, destroying at least 1,831 homes and leaving roughly 7k people homeless.

I'm not going to try and turn this blog into a news article about the recent / current tragedy, as I'm sure you already know all about it. If you don't, a quick internet search will bring hundreds of more accurate and up to date sources. I would like to suggest that this Black Friday is rather fitting as yet another day for Australia / the world to consider the tough times being faced by many Victorians as a consequence of what has been dubbed Scorched Saturday, to do whatever they can to contibute to relief efforts, and to mourn the loss of not only the magnitude of human life lost, but the countless animals and pieces of history sure to have gone down with them.

For those who don't already know about it, today Coles is donating all their profits to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal, so I suggest if you have any shopping to do, you take the time to do it today at a Coles supermarket.

Because this blog was intended to show the link and superstition about Black Friday and Friday the 13th, I shall leave you with this excerpt from a biography about Gioachino Rossini, an Italian composer, which they believe is the first documented reference to Friday the 13th being unlucky - written in 1869.

He was surrounded to the last by admiring and affectionate friends; and if it be true that, like so many other Italians, he regarded Friday as an unlucky day, and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that on Friday, the 13th of November, he died.