New Christmas

If Halloween is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, there’s a reason for that.

“Black Friday” — the day after Thanksgiving, when retail stores typically begin turning a profit on the year — has traditionally been the start of the economically vital holiday shopping season.

Stores, however, are edging toward making Halloween the starting line for holiday shopping. In many stores, seasonal sales and promotions began.

By itself, Halloween isn’t a particularly big retail event. The National Retail Federation predicted that spending would be $5.8 billion, back to 2008 levels just before the economic roof fell in.

By contrast, spending over the traditional Thanksgiving to New Year’s season is anticipated to be $447 billion, up 2.3 percent from last year.

The stores were happy to sell large quantities of candy, costumes and decorations, but that’s not the point of Black Friday’s informal move.

The idea was to increase traffic in the stores, entice shoppers with sales on bigger ticket items and hope they return later in the holiday season. Unsaid is that the stores hoped to get the shoppers while they still had money.

Holiday sales have become important barometers of American economic activity. We Americans have a simple way of observing our holidays. We spend. And that spending drives 70 percent of the economy.

— The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn.