It’s that time of the year again. Filled with joy and cosy gatherings of friends and family, parties, loads of good food and all those things that come with Christmas.
But Christmas is also filled with stress and anxiety for many because of pressure to be cheerful all the time, to buy loads of things you can’t afford and to be the perfect host or hostess at said family gatherings. Some don’t celebrate it, and of course, for many, Christmas is an awful time of the year because of problems in the family, not enough money in the bank account, or for reasons like loneliness.
Money matters but my wish this holiday, and all other years, is that the spirit of Christmas and the joy it brings, isn’t brought by money and consumption. That it’s brought through candlelight, carols, arts and crafts, spending time with the people you love, or people you don’t know who may be spending the holidays on their own (google charities that you can donate to or donate your time as a volunteer at local community centres that will often host Christmas gatherings for those in need).
To buy or not to buy?
As I mentioned in my previous post on the commercialisation of the holiday season, Christmas is to many and most about consumption. Buying food, or ingredients to all those things you’re told you should be baking and making. Buying decorations to follow the latest trends in how to create the perfect Christmas atmosphere at home. And buying presents, a lot of presents to most people you know or barely know.
But why and for whom are we doing this? If your favourite thing in the world is to bake and Christmas baking gives you the most tremendous joy because it’s yummy and it means you can treat your friends to baked goods, then by all means, go ahead and make the most of it. But if we do it because we feel it’s expected of us but actually, it just stresses us out and make us wish for January to come quicker than we can say gingerbread, then maybe it’s not for us.
Decorating your home for Christmas may be a nice way to light up this dark time of the year, but if you feel stressed about buying new decorations because you feel the ones you have may not be very trendy anymore then try to think of them all as classics. They’re often a bit kitsch anyway so don’t take it too seriously – Christmas decorations trends come and go but the things you like are the ones that last. And if you’re not spending Christmas at home so don’t really see the point of spending time decorating, then don’t. There’s plenty of blinking lights and glittery baubles out there already.
Can we find other ways to treat our loved ones this Christmas?
When it comes to Christmas consumption, the presents we’re all buying each other are of course the big elephant in the room. Because we know, as people on this planet, we need to change the way we consume in order to save it. But yet, the US Christmas sales are predicted to surpass $1 trillion for the first time ever this Christmas. There’s an increasing amount of people in the world with increasing amounts of money, but surely that can’t be the only reason we’re seeing these numbers?
So, we’re reading the climate change reports, and we know consumption is a great source of worry, but we’re still shopping like never before.
Over the last few years, as I’ve been embracing a more conscious way of living and have been doing a lot more reading on consumption, I’ve not just come to question the amount of (unnecessary?) stuff we buy, but also the role of consumption in our society and in our relationships with other people. Because why is it that, to show someone we care, we buy them a load of stuff? What does that actually say about us, about them or about our relationship?
Maybe something completely different would actually show them how much they truly mean to us? Something we’ve made ourselves, or something that means we get to spend more time together, like the gift of going out for a nice meal together. Or maybe that thing we have in our home or in our wardrobe that we know they’ve always loved – maybe this Christmas, we wrap it up in a cloth or recycled newspaper, and give it to them as a present. Because once we start thinking about gifting as something different than the retail ads show us, we realise that not shopping that way is not really a sacrifice, and that actually, the possibilities are endless.
I’ll leave you with these words by journalist and author George Monbiot:
“Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t”