After today, there are 15 shopping days until Christmas. Have you got it all wrapped up or are you still looking for inspiration?

At the end of last month, many large retailers offered generous-sounding discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to entice us to part with our money. There is a degree of cynicism about how big a bargain these deals represent, and although Black Friday only crossed the Atlantic in the last decade, some large retailers in the UK disowned it quite early on following widespread punch-ups on the shop floor over heavily discounted goods. Black Friday is also Buy Nothing Day, started in Canada as a protest against consumerism.