Culture Facts

Black Friday is the biggest shopping bonanza to be held in the run up to Christmas when retailers offer huge discounts and deals to enable customers to kick start their Christmas shopping.

It occurs on the Friday following America’s “Thanksgiving day” which in 1939 was deemed by President Roosevelt to take place on the last Thursday of November.

Black Friday originated in America. In the 1950s and 60s the Philadelphia Police Department nick named the day Black Friday due to the frenetic shoppers pushing and fighting to get their bargains – a bit like our Boxing Day sales here in the UK.

Amazon were one of the first online companies to introduce Black Friday to Britain about 4 years ago, and as everyone loves a bargain and retailers saw the benefit of higher sales before Christmas it didn’t take long for everyone to jump onto the band wagon.

Asda, who are owned by the American Company Walmart, were the first major retailer to offer in-store Black Friday deals last year and they sold 60% of their Black Friday stock within two hours!

Black Friday has taken over Britain’s Boxing and New Year’s Day sales, as the companies realised that people were more willing to spend as they were looking for offers on Christmas gifts.

A sonnet is a form of poetic writing.  A sonnet has fourteen lines (in English) and ten syllables to each line.

Different rhyming patterns have been followed at different times. Shakespeare wrote 153 sonnets and generally ended them with a rhyming couplet.

A sonnet is almost always a complete poem and not one that can be set to music, like a ballad or lyric.

One famous sonnet used was in Romeo and Juliet, when the lovers meet for the first time and Shakespeare divided a sonnet between them.

The Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768 by George III after talks with one of the leading painters at that time, Sir Joshua Reynolds.

There was to be a president and forty academicians and the Academy was to hold regular exhibitions of art, which had to include not only members work but contribution from outside bodies as well. 

Not long after it was set up the Academy instituted its own school which acted as an enormous encouragement to young artists whatever their background.

The King selected 36 out of the 40 members which included the famous landscape and portrait painter, Thomas Gainsborough. 

He made Sir Joshua Reynolds the first president and held the position until his death in 1792.

To start with at the age of ten Pablo Picasso was a mature painter,  and he was still painting into his 90’s.

Picasso was born in Spain in 1881, and became an exceptional painter of high merit.   His early work representational, but as he grew up he embraced all aspects of artistry from Expressionism, abstract painting to Cubism to many more.

His work was quite complicated and was sometimes hard to understand.   His painting were daring yet could sometimes be irritating, yet they always attracted the attention they deserved.

Even in the year of his death in 1973, he was still painting as commandingly as ever, but he’s particularly remembered for the paintings from his ‘blue period’ in 1901 to 1904.

The Talmud is an assemblage of writing which incorporate the works of Jewish scholars and it shows the records of their discussions, especially over legal matters.

There are two versions, both of which contained the Mishnah which is the spoken law handed down from generation to generation since the time of Moses.