Black Friday to White Saturday!

My daughter doesn’t work on a Friday and contacted me on Thursday evening, proposing that we should do something together as she has just been too busy recently for us to see much of each other - no quality time.

As the day was so fine and bright we opted to walk to the local garden centre, just for a look around so that I could see what they are charging for potted, growing Christmas trees. (Last year’s appeared to die off and then grew again but not in a aesthetically pleasing way. The poor thing is simply too half-bare to be worth decorating!) We looked at the high quality tat on sale and marvelled at how garden centres have morphed into places where you can buy useless ornaments such as antelope skulls complete with horns!

After that we continued our walk to a coffee shop and then on to the park where the smallest grandchild played on the swings. All in all a good morning spent getting some exercise, catching up with the gossip and setting the world to rights!

We had considered going into Manchester centre but rejected the idea when we remembered that it was Black Friday and that the centre was likely to be full of people hunting for bargains they never knew they needed and spending money they don’t have. This morning’s paper reports a slow start to Black Friday with a drop in the number of shoppers visiting stores. But all was well in the end. As the paper put it, “momentum built up during the day and Barclaycard, which processes half of all debit and credit card transactions in the UK, estimated Black Friday spending finished up 8% on 2016”. Phew! What a relief! I can relax about that now!

What a lot of nonsense! Whatever did we do before there was Black Friday? And we don’t even have the excuse of the day before having been Thanksgiving and all the shops being closed. Mind you, it would not surprise me if we started celebrating Thanksgiving soon, if only to say how glad we are to live here and to give is another excuse to cook a huge meal and drink a lot!

But seriously, what DID we do before we started celebrating Black Friday? How difficult life was when we had to wait for the January Sales, which now begin on Boxing Day, by the way! Personally, I avoid the sales as far as possible; I must suffer from a specialised form of claustrophobia which deters me from fighting my way through crowds in order to rummage through piles of stuff that I might want to buy atba reduced price.

Besides, nowadays almost all shops seem to have special offers going on almost all year round. The only difference is the percentage reduction. With a bit of careful observation you can buy stuff with a 40-50% reduction at just about any time. What a strange world it is!

This morning we woke up to Christmas card scenes. Snow, but not too much of it, had fallen overnight. Indeed, it started to fall again when I was out running. At the cricket club up the road a mysterious teepee has appeared. Goodness knows what that is about. Probably nothing to do with the weather though.

When I popped into the local Co-op store to buy the Saturday newspaper, one of the assistants reminded me that last year at exactly this time the store was being refurbished and the store was closed. As this is the only shop in the village they were selling essentials like milk and bread and a very limited range of goods from a “pop-up shop” in a portacabin on the carpark. And on this very weekend, as they opened their very cold “pop-up shop”, it snowed.

History repeats itself!