Halt the Holiday Hustle

Sixty percent of Americans say they are stressed by the thought of shopping during the Christmas season. Black Friday has come and gone and today is the top day for shopping electronically. So we survived the Thanksgiving Holiday and are heading toward Christmas. If you are one that finds this this to be less than jolly, let me reprint Halt the Holiday Hustle and put JOY back into Christmas from the 2005 Farmers’ Almanac.

There is so much good that goes on during the Holiday Season. Make the holiday season extra special for you and your family. Here is food for thought:

Ahh the holidays …

Blood pressures rise and trash bins overflow with the 5 to 7 million tons of extra garbage produced in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. All that trash is just one of the impacts our annual buying binge has on the environment. To put that into perspective, if everyone lived like the average American, we’d need another four planets to provide the raw resources and the space to dump the wastes.

There’s considerable evidence that our ever-growing pile of stuff—big-screen TVs, fancy electronic gadgets, etc.—aren’t making us any happier. Not surprisingly, nearly four out of five Americans surveyed want a simpler, less materialistic holiday with a greater emphasis on things that money can’t buy.

“People are looking for a better quality of life, not more stuff,” says Sean Sheehan, of the Center for a New American Dream, a nonprofit foundation devoted to sensible consumption and the protection of the environment. “What people really want during the holidays is less frantic running around, and more time to relax and have fun with their families,” asserts Sheehan. “We’ve done the survey since 1997, and the results are fairly consistent.”

Despite a desire to “dematerialize,” the spending spree continues, with dire consequences. Consumer debt has doubled in the past ten years, and a record 1.6 million Americans declared bankruptcy in 2003. A lot of that indebtedness is rung up during the holidays.

“People feel an awful lot of pressure, especially from their kids, to buy stuff,” Sheehan says. Behind all that pressure are more than 230 billion advertising dollars, a significant portion of which is aimed right at kids.

Reclaiming Your Rights to the Holidays

The trick to dealing with this powerful commercial juggernaut is to take time, in the relative calm of summer for instance, to talk about what your ideal holiday season would be. Don’t think of it as breaking the tradition, but as creating a better one. Patience and a little creativity can work wonders. For example, a few years back, my family decided that the adults would each draw one name for gift giving. The pile under the tree was considerably smaller, but the gifts were better. More importantly, we’re having more fun finding the right gift—often holding consultations with other family members—and feeling less rushed.

The conspicuous consumerism of Christmas has confused us about what we really want from the world, writes Bill McKibben, the author of Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas. McKibben has long championed a movement that advocates a $100 spending limit per family as a way of “reclaiming the holidays.”

“The point is not to stop giving; the point is to give things that matter,” he says. And the things that matter to most people these days are time, attention, memories, and joy. (See list above for ideas.)

“What makes us really happy are relationships, being creative, and
working towards a larger purpose than our own lives,” says Mark Burch, author of several books on voluntary simplicity, including Stepping Lightly: Simplicity for People and the Planet.

The annual holiday spending spree is “an environmental nightmare that
keeps us running ever faster on the work-and-spend treadmill,” Burch
says.

The Scrooge Factor

Another powerful force that keeps us buying more and more stuff during the holidays is the fear that someone will think we’re cheapskates like Scrooge. This is especially true when it comes to gifts for children or grandchildren, and, as a result, hundred-dollar electronic toys or games are not uncommon these days. But what do kids really, really want? They want to have fun. A friend told me this story from his family’s most recent Christmas: The children, ages 6, 8, and 10, spent a delightful afternoon playing with a big cardboard box, while $1000 in toys lay unopened under the tree.

We tend to underestimate the value of thoughtful homemade gifts (a photo album all about a child), or experiential gifts (taking a hike in the woods). And we forget that the holidays should also be about helping others. Many families donate a night to help out at a food bank or a shelter. Those shared experiences will be fondly recalled at family dinners years in the future. More fun, less stuff—isn’t that the kind of holiday you really want?

The Grinch had it right: Christmas doesn’t come in a store.

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