The madness of Black Friday has become so ingrained in American culture that it can be difficult to imagine a time before it. However, in 1905, the Post’s editors felt compelled to let readers know that the weekend after Thanksgiving would be a good time to start shopping for Christmas gifts “in calmness and deliberation, without recklessness, without hysteria.”
The editors also offered some general guidance for choosing meaningful gifts that still rings true more than a century later.

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Comments
What three paragraphs have ever been written that make more beautiful sense concerning the most important aspects of gift giving advice?
This editorial is onc that most Americans today would scoff at and ridicule as being so hopelessly old fashioned and out of date, out of touch, as to have no meaning at all.
How sad it is that the day after Thanksgiving is nothing BUT shoppers standing in deep dozens before the counters in a reckless hysteria, often buying trashy gifts for recipients who’ll want to return them OR “re-gift” them to someone else. Lack of core values and common sense today, combined with unprecedented corporate greed have created the most terrible/stressful/ugly time of the year. The very name “Black Friday” has an ominous grotesqueness to it that’s really disturbing.