I can get on board with Thanksgiving. Let’s face it, a meal spent with family and friends busily giving thanks (but mainly eating and drinking) is a very nice thing to adopt from our American cousins.

I’m vegetarian so a turkey may not be the dinner of choice, but I can certainly hold my own with the abundance of just about everything besides the bird. Any excuse for a pre-Christmas Christmas sounds good in my book.

And this year I heard that plenty of Oxfordians took part in a “Brits-giving” version of the American holiday.

However, waking from the food hangover on a Friday morning to queues of people winding their way around Cornmarket is something I NEVER wish to experience.

And thanks to the shops recognising how to suck consumers in like flies to a rotten pound of flesh, I may experience it soon.

For the first time, I noticed copious amounts of posters up in UK shops advertising that most terrible of days: Black Friday.

Black Friday epitomises all the worst bits of Westernised society in one terrible day: shopping and – most importantly – shopping for bargains.

Which essentially means shopping for things you don’t need but imagine you must need since they are now less than half price.

Shopping because it's good for the store, regardless of how bad it may be for one’s soul.

This all leads to lots of queuing. American consumers queue around blocks overnight to get the “best deals” despite not really realising they needed the “best deals” until they knew “best deals” would be available.

I don’t queue for anything. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that even if my darling, dead Dad was appearing for one night only at Oxford Playhouse and there was a three-hour queue I’d only go begrudgingly.

So to see the footage of people pushing through department store doors clambering over one another (in some cases seriously injuring one another) is something I could never begin to understand.

There’s nothing in this world I could ever want that much.

But then, we’ve created a culture of consuming. I consume therefore I am. The Americans have given us two days of the year focused completely on consuming. With a bit of thanksgiving thrown in for good measure.

Thank goodness Black Friday hasn’t fully taken over Oxford yet.

We must fight it to the end otherwise it will be the end of us: queues of people trampling one another on the way into Crabtree & Evelyn.

Old ladies beating each other to death over the lavender soap in Boswells.

I can only thank goodness that Cornmarket isn’t yet quite so affected.

Unfortunately, I chose Thanksgiving as the day to travel to California. Which meant I had a British Airways Thanksgiving meal and was in the land of the plenty for Black Friday.

The land of plenty indeed: plenty of prize turkeys, killing themselves for a bargain.

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