Black Friday, should anyone be unfamiliar with the term, is the Friday that ends the week of US Thanksgiving (the last Thursday in November). It is the day when retail outlets, which make up a major proportion of the national economy in many countries around the world, start to turn a profit (i.e. go into the black) for the first time during the year. If black Friday turns red, dire consequences may ensue.

In Ancient Egypt, Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti attempted to institute a new official proto-monotheistic religion, based on exclusive worship of the disc of the sun. They closed down the old shrines and temples to the many gods of Egypt and the cycles of festivals that clustered around these religious sites were discontinued, along with the old priests’ lucrative trade in charms, prayers and amulets. The result was economic meltdown, famine and plague, coups, counter-revolution and an eventual return to the old regime.

Opinion is still divided as to the benefits of Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution. Few nowadays doubt the economic efficacy of consumer-fuelled festivals such as Christmas. In fact, as Black Friday would seem to attest, this (at once spiritual and material celebration) has become the very hinge of the world economic system: the annual rite that tips us back from the red into the black; a practically natural phenomenon, as reliable as the rising and falling of the Nile.

Christmas, of course, was not originally a Christian holy day, but a focus of various pagan celebrations of the coming of the Winter solstice, and with it the end of the dark days of winter and the beginning of the slow ascent towards spring and the regeneration of the earth. The Early Church cleverly incorporated such festivals into its liturgical cycles and even the most radical of modern protestant sects do not outlaw celebration of Christmas, be it in the form of reflection on the deeper meaning of the birth of Christ or that of an occasion for almsgiving and the exchange of gifts and goodwill.

Gifting has become a (perhaps the) central feature of Christmas. This is fully in keeping with the importance that anthropologists attribute to gifts as a way of crafting social and economic cohesion. Gifts, however small, incur a cost (a sort of sacrifice) that ripples back through and stimulates the economy; they also twitch social and family networks (however threadbare they may have become in the course of the year) momentarily back to life. Scrooges are rightly reviled.

Such rituals that consolidate economic prosperity and social cohesion were common in the past. The fisherman’s Black Friday came on Good Friday; that of the farmer at Harvest Festival. Greed may not be good; but consumption, even of the conspicuous kind, may, on certain occasions, help to lubricate the economy and elevate the human spirit. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of the earth; especially when a discount is involved…

Nevertheless, the precarious balance between sustainability and ruin on which the Western capitalist economy perches itself each year on Black Friday should be a serious cause for concern. Our economic prosperity and our very future depend on a single month out of twelve and on ever-dwindling good-will. As the economic advent calendar ticks down ever more tightly at end of each year, surely this does not augur well. Spiritual and material goodwill need to be distributed more generously throughout the rest of the year as well.