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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Ruth Wilde, national coordinator of the Inclusive Church

Good morning.

Today is Black Friday, or so we are told. It’s one of the strange anomalies of living in the UK that we kind of half celebrate American things but don’t really understand why!

Black Friday is a day on which everything in the shops is supposed to be reduced in price. It’s the day directly following Thanksgiving, so it’s a bit like the Boxing Day sales the day after Christmas. Research has shown, however, that shops only really pretend to reduce the prices by raising them immediately before and then reducing them again on Black Friday. They are tricksy those retailers! Also, the problem in the UK is that we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, so Black Friday has no real reason to exist. That doesn’t stop our very odd – and of course very opportunistic – retail industry from deciding that we should celebrate it.

An interesting development now is that the UK not only has Black Friday without having Thanksgiving, but also has a new special event on the same day which people have invented as a protest against Black Friday: Buy Nothing Day. This day has really taken off and a lot of people mark that day instead. So we have this strange, dare I say, very British situation in which half the population is buying things on a day which exists for no reason, and half the population is protesting a day which shouldn’t exist in the first place! In the meantime, no publicity is bad publicity for the retailers, I’m guessing. Maybe we should change Buy Nothing Day into Buy an Experience for your Loved One Day or Make a Cake for your Sister Day instead! That is, if we want to be more sustainable but simultaneously turn the day into something more positive.

God of all, help us to work for the good of the planet and all the people in it.

Amen.