Blacklisting Black Friday

Black Friday again.  It's OK, I'm not going into my yearly rant about how it is utterly meaningless in the UK because we don't have the preceding Thursday off for Thanksgiving.  After all, with most shops shut due to lockdown 2.0, it was utterly meaningless regardless of whether we celebrate Thanksgiving or not.  Of course, the shutting of non-essential shops is probably why my inbox was full of promotional e-mails about Black Friday deals from Argos, Amazon (both UK and US), eBay, Lenovo (I once bought a laptop from them), even the web designers I bought The Sleaze's Wordpress theme from.  I didn't look at any of them, instead marking them as 'read', unopened.  Perhaps for next year I should blacklist anything with 'Black Friday; in titles as spam.  I'm just not interested in their supposed 'Black Friday deals' - apart from the fact that they rarely ever represent the lowest price point for the items in question, but the reality is that they only offer these 'deals' on stuff they can't sell otherwise.  The fact is that online retailers, in particular, have offers and price reductions on various bits of their stock all year round - it isn't confined to just the one day.  But it isn't about logic, it is about driving sales pre-Christmas - even though Christmas is cancelled this year.  Yeah, I know that 'Fatso' Johnson has spent the week mumbling away about 'Christmas bubble' and five day 'ceasefires' and the like but, in effect, celebrating Christmas as usual is highly inadvisable this year.

Personally, I really don't understand this fetishisation of Christmas as some kind of ideal family gathering.  The reality is that many people spend the year complaining about the prospect of a family Christmas, seeing it as an unwelcome imposition upon their time.  Well, this year presents them with the opportunity to do it differently.  To do it my way, in fact.  For more than two decades now, I've been enjoying a peaceful solitary Christmas Day.  believe me, it's great - you can eat what you want, (if you don't like turkey, fuck it, don't have turkey), you can spend all day on the sofa, drink as much as you like, watch what you want to on TV and, best of all, not be bothered by other people 'celebrating'.  It was the best choice I've ever made with regard to the festive season: I actually enjoy Christmas now and look forward to my day of peace.  But then, I'm a miserable, misanthropic git.  Don't get me wrong - I don't begrudge people who want the other type of Christmas, (if you have children then, obviously, you are going to celebrate it differently), I just want to be left alone to do my own thing.  I'm just saying that if you are one of those people who always moans about family Christmases but still goes along with them, well, this is your chance to do something different.  Make something good come from this pandemic by having a scaled down, personalised, celebration.  You might never get another chance.