Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Save us from these American exports.

I was just starting to slightly get over the whole idea of Christmas – reasoning to myself in soothing tones that really, it’s not that bad, is it?

So long as you avoid all shops and town centres between the first mince pie sighting in late August and Christmas Eve at 5pm, it’s really not too awful during that tiny shopping gap between close of business on the 24th and the shops reopening again at the crack of dawn on the 26th.

I was starting to think about fairy lights and gingerbread, and starting to exhale a bit.

And then along comes a brash multi-headed monster called Black Friday, Cyber Monday and you are left in no doubt at all that this creation we once called Christmas is over, and has been replaced by Cashmas.

American Cashmas, with its bastard offspring Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

What are these made up idiocies and why are we allowing ourselves to be sucked in?

Because the half year build up to December 25 isn’t horrific enough already?

Because we are not bombarded enough with jingling jangling commands to spend?

To make it the best, most fun, greatest, most amazing Christmas in the history of forever, by purchasing the latest digital communication device?

Never mind the pukey schmaltz of those pseudo-cinematic department store adverts hurled at us every year as some kind of cultural event, instead of what they actually are – an ad for a big shop full of shiny crap none of us need.

No. Black Friday goes further. Black Friday – so called because it apparently lifts American businesses out of the red and into the black in a single day’s frenzied spending – aims to turn shopping into something gladiatorial. Arm to arm combat. Elbow to face, knee to groin, nostril to eyeball.

Do we want a 92 inch flat screen in return for our soul? Do we want it so badly that we are prepared to camp outside overnight on a freezing pavement like some retail refugee, then hospitalise anyone who gets in our way as we stampede towards the fluorescence?

Like a plague virus, Black Friday is spreading. It has made its way across the Atlantic and had already infected several large cities in the UK, where those on the frontline – security guards on minimum wage – were left to fend against the rabid hoards pursuing giant tellies, in supermarket scenes that looked more like the zombie apocalypse than routinely high-stress Christmas shopping.

Anyway it’s nothing to do with Christmas shopping, which as we all know, is about buying bath salts and hideous knitwear for people who will instantly return them the second the shops reopen.

This is something far more sinister. And by sinister I mean American, a place where they shoot children, and give life sentences for smoking weed.

America used to give the world stuff like jazz and feminism – now its cultural exports include Black Friday and a militarised police force.

I’m off to barricade myself indoors and make some gingerbread.