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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, and today we hit thing number 50. We've come halfway in this series with today's episode special for the holiday season, 100 years of Christmas Shopping. Our guests for this are Philip Olson and Julia Lorenz-Olson, co-hosts of the PBS series called Two Cents. Philip and Julia are a married couple who are certified and accredited financial planners and own the financial planning firm called The Art of Finance, and to the point of this segment, they have a PBS streaming video called The History of Christmas Shopping. Julia and Philip, it's so great that you could do this with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Hello. Thanks so much for having us.

Philip Olson: Thanks for having us, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, this series is called 100 Years of 100 Things, but in your PBS video, you go back a little more than 100 years, like back 1,700 years to Christians moving Jesus' birthday to December 25th to match up with the gift-giving pagan holidays that were already part of human culture, I guess, in parts of Europe, so late December or winter solstice, gift-giving goes back that far?

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes, absolutely. In the Roman days, you had what's called as Saturnalia, and it was very typical for people to be exchanging gifts at that time. There's actually a really interesting-- there was a poet named Martial who recorded what was being given to him, and there was like toothpicks and a pig, so it could really range as far as what people were giving each other.

Brian Lehrer: Taking a minor leap in time forward, 1,500 years, you peg the origin of Christmas as we know it today as beginning to form in the early 1800s, thanks to people like Charles Dickens and Oliver Cromwell. What did they do culturally to redefine Christmas?

Philip Olson: That's right. Before they came around in some of their novels that kind of redefined what we think of as Christmas today, Christmas was not a very popular and celebrated holiday. It was a little too pagany, a little bit too indulgent for many of the Puritans up until this time. Particularly Dickens and a couple of his contemporaries sort of romanticized this idea of Christmas as a holiday of warmth and family and particularly spending. There's a lot of gifting. There's a lot of celebrations and feasts. You think of Christmas Carol obviously being the big example of that, and that was really when this modern era of Christmas as a gift-giving, a consumeristic, a spending time we could point to is when it started yes.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and Christmas Carol by Dickens came out in the 1840s, and if you think about it, obviously we all know that story, it was about Scrooge being a penny pincher at Christmas, but then when he gets turned around, he gives a kid some money and says, “Go buy stuff,” so by the 1840s, they were definitely into Christmas associated with things, and by the end of the 1800s, Christmas gifts had begun to shift from being things people made to being things more frequently that people bought, as you tell us in the video. What caused that shift?

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes, absolutely. Obviously the boom in manufacturing, being able to mass produce products at a much cheaper price made manufactured goods far more easily available to those in the middle and even lower classes.

Brian Lehrer: You say some people back then recoiled from the garish department store displays. I guess I didn't realize department stores existed that long ago. Do you know the origin story?

Philip Olson: I don't actually know.

Julia Lorenz-Olson: No, but in my research, I thought it was very interesting in how important the department store experience was in creating a very strong consumeristic culture, especially here in the US. You have to think about it as this was really a destination for people. Now we can deck our halls very prettily, we can buy lights and all that stuff super easily, very cheaply, but back then, the stores really created a sensory experience for people. There were lights, there was all these decorations, things that you really couldn't get at home, so that was really a part of creating a tradition of going out as a family and going and buying gifts.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and it's consistent with so many things that come up in so many segments in this 100-year series, the industrial revolution that really started around the late 1800s and all the technological innovations, like electric lights that you were just describing, and the urbanization that went with the new kinds of jobs that were becoming the norm around then changes so many things, and Christmas shopping included, as it turns out, and you pin the origin of the department store Santa to 1890. What happened then?

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes.

Philip Olson: Yes, it was just kind of on a whim, one of the managers or owners, I believe, of Macy's, one of the big department stores at the time just decided to dress up as Santa Claus on a lark and it became a phenomenon to where all the department stores had their own and it became a tradition that is still going on today.

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes, and you have to think about it, that's really, really smart because, I don't know if you've got children or anybody out there listening has children, taking a kid to a store [laughs] is quite the experience. They see things and they want them, and so attracting a kid to go to a store is actually a very, very smart thing.

Brian Lehrer: Hence the department store Christmas windows, which you also get into in your video. One thing I learned from your video that I definitely did not know, you say the trend to start Christmas shopping season earlier and earlier didn't start with the retailers themselves, as we might assume, but with labor unions and the founder of the NAACP, Florence Kelley. What?

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes, I know, that was really interesting to me. She actually wrote a piece called The Travesty of Christmas, basically talking about how terrible the working conditions are for people creating goods, also in agricultural things, people selling food.

Philip Olson: She even spoke about a child that died on the Christmas season by running presents around and died of exposure, basically working too long of days and in too poor of conditions.

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes. She asked people essentially to make things easier for workers by shopping early, getting those things done earlier rather than right around Christmas time.

Brian Lehrer: That's a revelation, and you say in the PBS video that FDR moved Thanksgiving slightly earlier in the 1930s to accommodate more Christmas shopping, the fourth Thursday in Thanksgiving rather than the last Thursday, which is sometimes the fifth, and you give us the origin of the term Black Friday. When and what was that?

Philip Olson: Right. I had always thought that we use the language Black Friday because that's when the businesses get back in the black. They start to make some profit from all the sales of goods, which, first of all, does not actually happen. That does not really-- how it works for the businesses, but that's not where the name came from either. It was because that season was just such a zoo of people coming out and shopping in such a frenzy. The workers just were just worked to death that it was sort of black as in it was just like a terrible Friday and a terrible weekend for the workers in the retail stores. They were trying to bump it back, make it a little less frenzied, a little less crazy, and the modern day understanding of Black Friday being a get back in the black, back into profit, I think is just a maybe more positive twist that the retailers have latched onto.

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes, because there's one thing about a calendar year, but a business year, it's not necessarily January through December, so the idea that they're running in the red and then they get back to black, it actually doesn't quite work out that way.

Brian Lehrer: Now, as we all know, and you touch on this in the video, online shopping is so prominent. You've got a stat it accounts for 17% of Christmas shopping, and in addition to Black Friday, of course, we have Cyber Monday that's supposed to encourage online shopping. Are Black Friday crowds even a thing anymore? I don't feel like I hear those day after Thanksgiving people are busting down the Walmart door news stories anymore.

Philip Olson: It doesn't seem like it, does it? We actually released this video right before the COVID shutdowns, and so I think it was a little bit more mayhem back then and we all stopped shopping in person for a while. That stat of how much Cyber Monday shopping accounts for Christmas shopping, I'm sure is higher now, and yes, it seems to me you don't hear those crazy stories of people beating each other up for TVs anymore. Maybe that's just me.

Julia Lorenz-Olson: It's true. I mean, retailers ultimately want a frictionless buying experience for customers, so they don't necessarily want to pay the labor wages it takes to actually have people in person at their stores. Right? It's kind of a major win for them. They want it to be easier to buy, and we also as consumers want an easier experience where we're not going to be trampled to death, so it's a little win-win on both sides in terms of convenience, but in terms of pocketbooks, that might be another story.

Brian Lehrer: Was it in your video that I saw a stat that a lot of the online Christmas shopping takes place from people's work computers?

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes, it does.

Brian Lehrer: We won't tell.

Philip Olson: Only on lunch breaks, right?

Brian Lehrer: Of course, only on lunch breaks. You do touch on the backlash to the hyper-commercialization of Christmas, including the movement for a buy-nothing day, which is also pegged to Black Friday to make the point. Do you think the culture is pulling back from material Christmas at all or is that just in fairly limited alternative circles?

Philip Olson: Boy, it just seems like everybody's kind of navigating this in their own unique way. I've gone from one extreme of I'm not doing presents with anybody to all the other extreme of when I was a kid, which it's a consumeristic frenzy, and now it's kind of this sort of compromise because it can hurt people's feelings to not partake in gifts at all, but, Boy, it sure is a lot of pull to get sucked into this consumeristic frenzy. What we kind of do is just kind of limit our gifts to kind of little things we can fit in stockings. It's just our personal choice. It seems like the culture is kind of pushing against this consumeristic craziness, but as far as for the country, I can't speak to that.

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Yes, I think it would be tempting to think like, oh, all of a sudden we're waking up to this consumerism, but they were talking about this at the turn of the century, too, so there's like an inner discord within us that's like, “I know what this is supposed to be about, but I really like buying things and getting things.” It's hard.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. Do you think 100 years from now, all Christmas shopping will be done on Amazon? Maybe only gift cards with a few underground culture pockets where people secretly create their own things and actually talk to each other as they exchange gifts?

Philip Olson: The underground Santas, that does sound pretty good, but-

Julia Lorenz-Olson: I know.

Philip Olson: -no way. I think the in-person and the experiential process of Christmas is as immortal as Disneyland and going to the circus and all these types of kind of outdated things that we still want to keep, even though we can do it more conveniently, so I wouldn't be surprised if we still have mall Santas in 100 years personally.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, that's 100 Years of 100 Things, our Brian Lehrer show history series in honor of the station centennial thing number 50, halfway home, 100 years of Christmas Shopping. Philip Olson and Julia Lorenz-Olsen, co-hosts of the PBS video series called Two Cents, thank you so much and Merry Christmas to you.

Julia Lorenz-Olson: Thank you. Happy holidays.

Philip Olson: Thanks, Brian.

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