The Problem with Christmas? - Start thinking outside the cart.
Are you brave enough to say no to a high-stress holiday?
The problem with Christmas is not the batteries. The problem isn't even really the stuff. The problem with Christmas is that no one much likes it anymore.
Start thinking outside the cart.
If you poll Americans this time of year, far more of them regard the approaching holidays with dread than anticipation. It has long since become too busy, too expensive, too centered around acquiring that which we do not need. In fact, it's the perfect crystallization of the American economy -- the American consumer experience squeezed into a manic week, a week that people find themselves hoping will soon end so that on Jan. 2 they can return to the mere routine hecticity of their lives.
From that central truth, a few propositions follow:
- Replacing regular stuff with green stuff isn't getting very close to the root of the problem. If for some reason you need to give someone a motorized spice rack, then a motorized spice rack with a more efficient motor is quite clearly better. But it's also quite clearly beside the point.
- Stuff itself is a problem less because of its environmental toll (though that is quite high) than because it's increasingly meaningless. Think of your friends. Are many of them lacking in stuff? Or is the first question that forms in their minds when a new gift arrives from under the tree: "Where am I going to put this?"
- But this pleasure gap allows for a concentrated opportunity to begin rethinking our economic life. If stuff isn't valuable anymore, what is? Time, clearly. A gift of time -- a coupon for a back rub, or a trip to the museum, or a dinner prepared someday in the future -- is a gift whose exchange rate is figured in a stronger currency (if you're an economics major, think euros vs. dollars). Or gifts can come embedded with time already spent: a jar of homemade jam, a stack of firewood in the back yard.
- Gifts can also be reconfigured to remove some of the hyperindividualism that marks our consumer society. Ask yourself what you'd rather receive: another thing, or a homemade card saying that, say, a cow had been purchased in your name and was now providing milk for a Tanzanian family that hadn't had milk before. (Note: this line of reasoning is probably especially strong for those of us who are Christians, and recall that the occasion we're celebrating is the birth of a man who said to give all that we had to the poor.)
- Since Christmas has long been in the business of baptizing consumption, it's a good place to start eroding consumption's allure. Newfound pleasures from a simpler holiday -- some silence, some companionship -- suddenly start to seem attractive. Maybe that attraction will remain with us yea even unto February.
The Gift of Nothing
That would be good, because our environmental problem, at root, isn't that the stuff we're buying uses too much energy or too much plastic, or that its paint has lead in it, or that it's been shipped too far. Our environmental problem is that we consume way too much because we've agreed to try and meet basic human needs -- status, respect, affection -- with material ends. And no time more so than at Christmas, when Santa rides in on a Norelco razor. It's a kind of joint conspiracy that few of us dare break out of, even though we all understand at some level that it's not working. What if you don't give your kids a "proper Christmas"?
But the second you do break out of it -- the second your family becomes one of those that exchanges used books at Christmas, or decides to follow St. Francis' Yule tradition of wandering the park and throwing seed so that the birds too could celebrate, or makes it an annual custom to serve turkey dinner at the homeless shelter -- then you start sharing in the deep human secret that consumer society is set up to obscure: the things that please us most are almost always counterintuitive. We need to be out in the cold air, we need to think about others, we need to serve.
There are, of course, some who will say that a course like the one I'm describing here will damage the economy -- that anyone who proposes a different Yuletide is a "grinch." (This, by the way, is a major literary faux pas. Close reading -- even cursory reading, or even viewing the annual television special, will remind one that it was in fact the grinch himself who believed that Christmas came in a box. He turned out to be wrong, as the Whos of Whoville, those communists, made clear.) You could answer those people by saying, "Well, it won't all happen at once, and the economy will have time to adjust." Or you could answer by saying, "Maybe you're right. And maybe the economy isn't therefore quite as rational and as obvious as we would like to believe, if in fact it depends on a corrupted celebration of Jesus' birth to stagger on for another year."
The second answer appeals to me. We need a kiss to break our enchantment, and a kiss (a coupon for a kiss! Or a dozen!) is a perfectly fine gift to give for Christmas.
Read more about: consumerism | green living | holiday | shopping | all of these topics
| Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change, and, more recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. |
Council of Canadians London Chapters Suggestions
Give the gift of social and economic justice & environmental activism - give a membership or donate to a cause. Whether your loved one gets fired up about animal welfare, food politics, coal, there's a green group out there. Not sure which one is the best fit? There are so many great organizations big & small that depend on our generosity to give in order to do the work that protects all of us - you really cannot go wrong.
Adopt a living animal / creature or an acre of rainforest
Something you made with your hands - Try coming up with something handmade. It will be more personalized than buying plastic crap from a store - much of it made while exploiting the people & planet in the process. Possibilities include hand made mittens made of fair trade organically grown fibres such as bamboo, organic wool, soysilk or hemp, compiling a photo album, baking holiday goodies with organic ingredients (local flour a bonus) such a beautiful loaf of focaccia, a poem, a story, a jar of homemade jam.
Gift certificate from a native nursery - http://www.amtelecom.net/~edentree/
Tickets - Tickets for independent cinema, theatre production, museum, a concert, play, sports event, film festival, art gallery, lecture series, a class, lessons in language, music or the arts.
Gift certificate for a restaurant (SOL food - Sustainable (vegetarian), organic, local where possible with an emphasis on fair trade - if in Toronto - check out Fressen - http://www.fressenrestaurant.com/ )
Any yummy food and especially organic, fair-trade, and hopefully with as little non-recyclable packaging as possible. Fair trade, organic chocolates & coffees, as well as organic wines are always great choices.
The fact is, the people around me insist on giving material items that I can unwrap and say "wow, that's exactly what I wanted!" With that constraint in hand, there are still many ways to be creative and eco-friendly:
Ten Thousand Villages – Located on Richmond Street they even have ‘Living Gifts’ starting at 19.99. Features beautiful, fair trade, hand crafted gifts by artisans in developing countries. Toys, pottery, beautiful books (AT U.S. list prices), coffee, chocolate, and much more.
http://www.tenthousandvillages.ca/cgi-bin/category.cgi?item=pageStore5007&template=fullpage-en
LUSH's Charity Pot Hand and Body Lotion - Six charities were been hand-picked to benefit from LUSH Handmade Cosmetics' new Charity Pot Hand and Body Lotion. 100% of proceeds after taxes are given to charities and to boot they are using their share to end the commercial seal hunt! The six charities are as follows:
Clean Ocean Action ~ Amazon Conservation Team ~ Tree People ~ Unicefs Unite for Children - Unite for Aids program ~ IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare ~ Water Can
http://usa.lush.com/cgi-bin/lushdb/CharityPot/
THINGS WE LIKE: Lush is against animal testing & uses fair trade, organic shea butter. THINGS WE DON”T LIKE: Located in mall (Whiteoaks) unless you use website for shipping.
Art supplies – beautiful quality art supplies, sketch books, etc.
Beautiful books - OK so a book is a "thing" and a "product". But somehow, if thoughtfully chosen, it's not "stuff". Good ones will hang about your house for ever quite tidily and never get out of date. And they're made to use and re-use almost indefinitely. Most communities have troves of wonderful used books in specialist stores, etc. Especially, try some classic fairy tales on your kids: they'll often have solid environmentalist and humanitarian messages (is there a difference?) that can last a lifetime, all wrapped up in that magic world that children all seem to inhabit much of the time. "The Princess and the Frog" teaches that seemingly altruistic acts can bring benefits in spades.
Clothesline - A made in Canada clothesline kit(yes – we make a high quality ‘old school’ one) with bamboo clothespins.
LINKS WE LOVE:
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Consumption.asp
http://adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/bnxmas/
http://www.presentsfortheplanet.ca/?EMS_MID=EMSx247x32176
http://www.buynothingchristmas.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment