Bear Paw Meanderings
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For many people, Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday because it stresses getting together and having a great meal. There is no gift buying and none of the religious overtones that come with Christmas, just a month away.
No, Thanksgiving is simply a time to get together and watch some football and have that great meal.
That is all different for people selling things. They have worked to the bones to make their stores and shops beautiful for buying those Christmas gifts for everyone and traditionally it all starts the day after Thanksgiving on Black Friday.
Black Friday refers to the time when many stores and shops go into the black for the first time in the year.
That was certainly true at the Lou Lucke Company. More true for early stores than for many today as we sold a lot of merchandise to farmers and ranchers and they paid their bills only in the fall after the harvest was in and the cattle were sold. The rest of the year we carried them.
It is not quite the same these days as Christmas sales and Christmas merchandising starts much earlier than Black Friday. When we were in business the day after Thanksgiving brought a lot of people into the store and that kept up until Christmas Eve. These days that bunch of people start out in the days before Halloween and are encouraged to buy early and buy a lot.
We decorated the Lou Lucke Company with hundreds of live Christmas Trees and we used huge mica posts to represent snow. Usually most all of our merchandise was under glass and one needed a salesman to buy anything. Not so the reason for that was that there was so much dust on early Havre streets and it got on store merchandise.
Not so at Christmas where everything was out and your brand new Pendleton shirt might have some mica flakes on it to look like snow.
Well, Thanksgiving was the prelude to all this madness which started up the next day.
Was it any wonder that on Christmas Eve when it was finally all over and the cash register had rung for the last time that season, there were drinks served to clerks and salesmen, bookkeepers and seamstresses on their way home.
Everyone was tired and anxious to spend a couple of days with their own families, many who had not been seen much since Thanksgiving.
Selling for Christmas was easy to do. Just have a good product at a fair price and be able to carry the people you are selling to for a while and you will make money enough to have a great turkey on your own table and smiles on the people sitting around the table talking about who was the better team that year, the Grizzlies or the Bobcats?
