That Time of the Month...

 Christmas seems to start sometime around July these days, and consist of dazzling, twinkly-lit fanfare leading up to a crushingly mediocre experience for everyone over the age of twelve.

 I'm not going to rail about the commercialisation of Christmas, because I'm not religious, and I'm not going to complain about the shitty music, because I think Slade probably need the income at this point. Everyone is sick of the hype already, so I have nothing to say on that score, and while I'm at it, yes, it is cold out, and no, that's not newsworthy.

 Generally speaking, even someone with my seemingly superhuman bile duct can get a bit jaded about being jaded about Christmas, so it's with some gratitude that my hackles have been awoken from their festive hibernation by a recent phenomenon, imported from the States.

 Depending on who you ask, there's a very specific, doom-laden moment in the run-up towards Christmas. Referred to as "Black Friday," it is the American tradition of having a massive sale at the end of November in the run-up to Christmas. This has been adopted by people in the UK as being the last shopping Friday before Christmas, because the stores are comparably nuts on both days. The internet, not to be outdone, has decided that Black Friday is the last Friday when things can be ordered online with a guaranteed Christmas delivery.

 And I'm here to call those people pussies.

 Christmas shopping is always a nightmare, to the point where anyone shopping in the week before the 25th should list "shotgun and riot shield" as their first purchases. Even my own risky strategy of doing all my holiday shopping at 11:59pm on the 24th of December in a motorway services has seen some pretty long queues, I can tell you.

 Still, shops are busy all through Christmas and again in January, and it's to be expected. There are some of us, however, who know a different Black Friday. A darker Black Friday. A Friday as pitch black as the darkest night of a lost soul in an Anaretian coal mine.

 I'm talking, of course, about the bar staff.

 For years in Britain, if not America, Black Friday was known in the hospitality trade as the last drinking day before Christmas. It was (and is) an absolute nightmare from start to finish, as every office and 9-5 business decides to go out on the town in the festive spirit before their week off, and people who should never, EVER have been let in on the secret of booze decide that it's party time.

 This is the night that a thousand people in a thousand bars decide that it might be fun to experiment with these so-called Jagerbombs the kids drink. This is the night when every man who wants to be Don Draper decides to punch his boss and fuck his secretary, or, if he's drunk enough, vice versa. This is the night Doris from accounting has her first sherry since 1977 and immediately vomits it all over the floor, walls and a plethora of irritating festive-jumper-wearing assholes. (Every cloud...)

 Of course, in the morning, these people will be hungover, remorseful, and, at worse, fired.

 Then they get on with their lives, while the bar staff spend the next day cleaning, nursing injuries and finding random objects and bodily fluids in new and unusual corners of a public saloon. They also don't get a week off over Christmas in which to recover from it.

 Black Friday in a department store is busy and tiring. I know. I've worked it. Christmas shopping is frustrating and exhausting, too. But it also has an end-point. It doesn't drag on until 3am and finally implode in a series of sobbing damsels in laddered tights and the sozzled jousting of battered knights. I know about those, too, because I've worked plenty of them.

 The "Black Friday" store-workers think of is easy. It's a whelp. A runt. It's a pretender to the throne. American bars, being full of Americans, probably don't even have an equivalent night because they drink like old people fuck, although god help the poor bastards who have to man the pumps if Americans ever decide to try a night of British-style bacchanalia.

 The real Black Friday - the hardest Black Friday - belongs to the bar staff and bouncers in every bar in Britain, and I think it's about time we took the phrase back. You think your shopping was hard work? Try working in a bar. You'll have to get it all done in desperate snatches before nightfall.

 When the real work starts.