IT MAY be only mid-November, but the Christmas shopping season is well and truly under way. The supermarkets are full of seasonal food; TV adverts are running on a loop. Black Friday, imported to the UK in 2010 by Amazon from the US — where it follows hard on the heels of Thanksgiving, and marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season — is now a fixture on the British high street. Business analysts report that the tipping point came in 2014, when Black Friday suddenly took off on this side of the pond. Readers may remember the chaotic scenes as bargain-hunters stormed the aisles and fought tooth-and-nail with fellow shoppers in their quest for prized goods. From then on, Black Friday (28 November this year) was firmly established in the UK retail calendar. These days, Black Friday promotions can last all month.
Figures from the retail industry show that seasonal sales in the UK are the highest in Europe: £88 billion in 2024, up £3 billion on the previous year. Second place went to Germany, which lagged £9 billion behind us. And, according to the Bank of England, average household spending went up by more than £700 last December. This sits uncomfortably against a background of statistics about deprivation in the UK, which has one of the worst child–poverty rates in Europe: it is ranked by UNICEF as 37th out of 39 comparable European and OECD countries. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, three in ten children (approximately 4.5 million) live in poverty in the UK. Of these, an estimated 3.6 million live in households that cannot afford food, heating, or bills.
It is little surprise, then, that a recent survey by the Children’s Society suggests that many young people find the build-up to Christmas overwhelming. The sample is relatively small — 2000 teenagers aged 13 to 16 — but the findings suggest that more than half of the younger generation experience a level of “festive strain”. Piled on top of schoolwork, exams, and the perils of teenage friendships, Christmas makes yet more demands. Those surveyed reported struggling with the pressure to present a picture of perfection on social media. Worries about gift-giving and money were reported to be a cause of stress, and, perhaps even sadder, the expectation to “look happy” while feeling miserable.
Christians will naturally argue that Christmas has little to do with extravagant spending and material gifts. The pressures, however, are real and acutely felt. There is something badly out of kilter in a country where 14.3 million people live in poverty but cannot escape the constant bombardment of messages dictating the recipe for an Instagram-perfect Christmas, and the implication that anything less constitutes failure. We might all wish for a return to simpler times. In the mean time, there has never been a more important time for the Church to challenge the prevailing culture.
