Black Christmas: The Horrifying Spectable Of Black Friday

It gives me a warm glow to think of all the stuff we’ve imported from America. Gonzo porn, crystal meth, Will.I.Am. The list goes on.

The next great cultural landmark is, of course, Black Friday, when it’s legally permissible to smash your fellow shoppers’ heads in with a mallet in order to ensure you have a larger television in your house for the next three years, which is when its built-in obsolescence kicks in and you have to buy another one.

Black Friday – named because in Revelations it explains that the last Friday in November will herald the end days in an Asda just outside Ealing – has come to sum up what Christmas is about these days. Namely, new electrical goods broadcasting shit into our eyes and ears in a larger, louder and definitionally-superior form to previously.

It’s very, very important that we acquire new electrical goods in this way – stepping on children and fighting with men, perhaps even striking women in the face – even though it’s just as easy to buy this stuff online at the same price on any other day.

You just don’t get the same sense of grasping individuality if you happen to buy the last HD 50″ LED TV online. It’s simply not as satisfying – no sense of victory at someone else’s expense. Thrown in the complete lack of physical aggression and resulting adrenaline rush and you might as well simply go to bed, rather than stay up all night waiting for the next time-limited auction of utter junk.

The media absolutely revels in Black Friday – and why not? It’s just a bit of Christmas fun that looks a little bit like life would in the event of nuclear war, a devastating outbreak of communicable deadly diseases or the collapse of Western civilisation.

Admittedly, the goods being fought over would probably be medicine, bread and batteries – rather than Beats By Dre headphones – but you get the idea.

Black Friday, so-named because of its visual similarity to Black Death, amounts to an amusing trial run of apocalypse played out for the benefit of an indulgently tut-tutting media, which gives a metaphorical head-muss to a cheeky toddler.

I wonder what the victors of Black Friday will think of, every time they switch on their Freeview-enabled TV, mounted over the fireplace, and watch American Horror Story for 84 hours. Or when it stops working and gets thrown in a skip in 36 months’ time.

Perhaps they’ll think back, with a nostalgic smile, to the Friday before Christmas when they pushed a woman to the ground and wrenched it from a child’s hands in a Tesco on the outskirts of Barnsley.

Merry Black Christmas.