BACK TO BLACK

When I first started to un­der­stand spo­ken lan­guage (Eng­lish, in this case, circa 1961) it seemed to me that come Yule­tide every adult in every room began to re­peat the mantra ’Christ­mas gets more com­mer­cial each year’ (or words to that ef­fect). And they kept on say­ing it until 1984, when I said good­bye to the lot of them and moved to Cat­alo­nia, only to find that it was com­mon­place to hear every­one over the age of twenty say­ing ex­actly the same thing, al­beit not in Eng­lish. In­deed, here it was even eas­ier to spot the on­slaught of Xmas, her­alded as it was by count­less ad­ver­tise­ments for the same three prod­ucts – per­fume, tor­rons (nougat slabs) and cava – which would spring up on cue some­time in mid-No­vem­ber. After a few years of this, it dawned on me that Christ­mas wasn’t get­ting more com­mer­cial every year, rather for decades it had al­ways been lit­tle more than a reg­u­lar cel­e­bra­tion of a vast shop­ping spree, and that the func­tion of the sea­sonal re­li­gious trim­mings (na­tiv­ity scenes, car­ols broad­cast in the street, etc.) was sim­ply to make the pub­lic feel less shame­ful about its ob­ses­sive-com­pul­sive pur­chas­ing. Once this had sunk in, Christ­mas be­came a known quan­tity, and so could be taken in its stride.

At least until fairly re­cently, thanks to the shoe­horn­ing of Amer­ica’s Black Fri­day into the Christ­mas rou­tines of coun­tries around the world. The term first ap­peared in cer­tain US cities in 1961 and later be­came more wide­spread in the 1970s and 1980s until its grubby lit­tle ten­ta­cles even­tu­ally reached out across the oceans in the early years of the mil­len­nium. It refers to the first Fri­day after Thanks­giv­ing (i.e. the fourth Fri­day of No­vem­ber) and marks the be­gin­ning of the Christ­mas shop­ping sea­son by of­fer­ing spe­cial dis­counts. There are two the­o­ries as to why it’s called ’black’, one being that it be­came fairly com­mon in the States for peo­ple to queue for hours and then in­jure them­selves, some­times se­verely, as they stam­peded into the stores; an­other is that it put most re­tail­ers in the black be­cause of all the money they made on that one day (these two the­o­ries are, of course, com­ple­men­tary). At first Black Fri­day seemed fairly in­nocu­ous: a tiny Amer­i­can tra­di­tion foisted upon us for only one day. But things have started to get out of hand. To begin with, the Black Fri­day of­fers have be­come more and more con­fus­ing, un­less you’re a char­tered ac­coun­tant. To give one ex­am­ple among many, in the win­dow of a Barcelona phar­macy, there were no less than 12 sep­a­rate posters of­fer­ing dif­fer­ent Black Fri­day dis­counts on hair and skin prod­ucts: one had a dis­count of 15%, but two of the same prod­uct got you 40% and so on up to four dif­fer­ent mark­downs. And that’s not all: more and more shops here are start­ing to lengthen Black Fri­day into weeks, or, in the case of a fur­ni­ture shop on the Merid­i­ana thor­ough­fare, through all of No­vem­ber. (They re­frained from call­ing it Black No­vem­ber, which sounds like a yet to be formed ter­ror­ist group). And the Or­ange phone com­pany is now try­ing to woo po­ten­tial cus­tomers with Or­ange Wednes­days, when they ap­par­ently give you a cou­ple of cin­ema tick­ets and, if I’m not mis­taken, a pizza. And more of these ’spe­cial’ days are doubt­less on the way. Here, at least, the last of them will surely fall on Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 6th, which marks the end of the Cata­lan Christ­mas sea­son, when every­body is stone broke or close to it. What they’ll call it is any­body’s guess. Red Sat­ur­day? Pen­ni­less post-Epiphany?