I heard about it before, and have seen videos uploaded to YouTube of stampedes and fistfights in stores, so I made a point of staying right at home today.
Yes, and no. Where I'm from, we don't have this Thanksgiving holiday everybody's been talking about these past few days, and in America, Black Friday is always the day after Thanksgiving. In Great Britain, the term is used by emergency services and the police to refer to the Friday before Christmas, when people start drinking to celebrate the hols, getting into accidents and fistfights and whatnot. Some American businesses have been trying to push their version of Black Friday on us, but so far it hasn't caught on, thank God.