This 'Black Friday' Nonsense

The advantage of my still getting so much Chinese spam is that it means that not every email I received this morning was trying to excite me about 'Black Friday'. Just in case you hadn't noticed, today is 'Black Friday' and I refuse to remove the black marks around those words because I refuse to allow that Yank-built bastard concept to enter into my vocabulary.

There's a falsely held belief that it was the Coca Cola corporation who invented the modern Christmas. Before Coke turned Santa red, so the myth would have us believe, he'd been some other colour, perhaps in a paisley shirt, plaid trousers, and with a dandy kipper tie. Before Cola's marketing whizzes got hold of him, Santa Claus (or Father Christmas) was Santiago Norman, bringer of the winter molluscs which we would have warded off by draping seaweed around the frame of our beds. They were simpler timers when Christmas morning was a time for bullying a hog and sticking needles in a pine cone.

Sadly, the Cola myth is all rubbish but there must be something about that particular tale which people seem to like. Or at least, certain people like. I mean, of course, that I particularly like. I like the idea that we can trace the modern Christ-free Christmas back to a time before it became a time for high tech toys and sodding the expense. It would be somehow fitting if the modern monster were the creation of a huge multinational company who didn't really have our best interests at heart.

Yet I have to accept that it is a false myth and only a madman would claim that a tyrannical billion dollar American company could, on whim, create a national holiday in honour of the god Mammon which everybody starts to celebrate by jamming their elbows into the eye sockets of the people standing next to them. There's no way a company could do that. It's just impossible.

Of course, it's equally impossible to believe that the police have been called to 11 different Tesco stores this morning where fighting had broken out among people so viciously materialistic that in the words of one woman 'I wanted a television, couldn't find a television, so I grabbed a Dyson and I'm not too sure if I want a Dyson or not'.

You have to hand it to Amazon. They're invented a new seasonal holiday which improves on Christmas which traditionally was a time when other people bought you things you didn't want. Black Friday is now a time when you buy yourself things you don't want. It's both genius and so utterly depressing.