This year’s Merger Monday served up a bountiful harvest

What in the name of Dow Jones is Merger Monday, you ask? 

Well, real holidays tend to beget made-up holidays. Most of us probably know Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving when online retailers discount the bejesus out of all of their products before the holiday rush. 

But the Monday before Thanksgiving is Merger Monday, a day when corporate board members and bankers wrap up all the deals they’ve been working on so they can enjoy some turkey, football, and family time. 

No, we’re not kidding. As Axios’ Dan Primack put it: “This isn’t about a macro economic shift. It’s about bankers and boards wanting to enjoy their Thanksgiving breaks, without constant cell phone pings.”

And this year, there were several juicy mergers on the table

Here’s a roundup of some of the most noteworthy of yesterday’s newly minted Turkey-day titans:

• The big bird: Charles Schwab announced plans to buy TD Ameritrade for $26B. The megamerger will result in a brokerage giant that controls more than $5T in assets. 
• The mashed potatoes: LVMH finalized plans to acquire jewelry giant Tiffany & Co for $16.2B. The deal’s been under negotiation since October, but LVMH only convinced Tiffany to pass its potatoes after asking nicely — AKA increasing its earlier $14.5B bid.
• The gravy: Novartis announced plans to acquire Medicines Co. — which is developing an innovative cholesterol drug that might not see sales until 2021 — for $9.7B. 
• The cranberry on top: eBay announced plans to sell StubHub to the Swiss ticket marketplace Viagogo for $4.05B. EBay acquired StubHub in 2007 for $310m, but now the company plans to offload businesses that aren’t essential to its core marketplace.

By day’s end, the stock exchanges were sitting fat and happy

More than $60B worth of deals closed by the end of the day, enough to satisfy even the bottomless appetites of America’s big exchanges. The Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 all closed at record highs.