How to have a very festive compromise
It’s the most wonderful time of the year.
In many ways, Christmas takes us back to a more traditional way of living - we prioritise time with family, spend time and effort choosing gifts that we hope our loved ones will appreciate, we cook, eat and celebrate together, and generally have a jolly good time. That said, whilst we’re having that jolly good time with the ones we love, it seems that for most of us, consideration of most other people and things goes right out the window. As Sophie Goddard said in her piece for Christmas in the December 2019 edition of Marie Claire “…mindless Christmas consumerism may feel merry with a mulled wine in hand but our planet is paying the price”. Boom.
I absolutely don’t want to play the Christmas Scrooge because, particularly this year, we all deserve to kick back and celebrate having gotten through 2020.
What I would like to do though is contextualise Christmas in terms of our consumption and spending outside of our immediate concerns. Christmas is a dearly held and very personal time of year, so any changes you make have to be right for you and your family. As a coach it’s not my job to tell you what to do but I am here to pose thought-provoking challenging questions… I’d love to give you a nudge in the direction of a more thoughtfully consumed Christmas. What compromises might you be prepared to make? What is a festive necessity, what is indulgence and what do you know will be thrown away before you even buy it?
I’ll spend a minute going through some stats because they speak for themselves - it is possible to have a very jolly time together without going bonkers because if we look again at Christmas as we ‘traditionally’ know it, isn’t actually all that traditional.
Evergreens in the home started as a way of keeping away witches, ghosts, evil spirits, and illness during the dark winter months; Christmas trees only came to the UK around 1840 as a tradition imported by Queen Victoria’s German husband Albert.
Prior to the 1930s, Father Christmas was more often dressed in grey, green or tan. St Nicholas - the name on Father Christmas’ birth certificate - was originally the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, prostitutes, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, unmarried people, students and gifting giving. It was a sustained advertising campaign from Coca Cola that turned him irrevocably red and fat - the artist Haddon Sundblom using his friend Lou Prentiss, a round, bearded retired salesman as his original model. Black friday originated in Philadelphia in the 1950s - police in the city used the phrase to describe the disruptive traffic caused by crowds of people descending into the city for the days after Thanksgiving. Over 20 years later, the phrase came to represent the point when retailers begin to turn a profit – from being “in the red” to “in the black”. Amazon introduced Black Friday offers to their UK customers in 2010, but it wasn't until 2013 when Walmart-owned Asda took part that it really started to take off. By 2014 many big retailers began to introduce their own Black Friday offers and sales have grown year on year. 2019 saw Americans spent $7.4bn online on Black Friday (fun fact: Amazon accounted for 54.9% of all sales on Black Friday), in the UK we spent £2.5bn in total.
Christmas as we know it today is an accumulation of sales pushes made by retailers over the twentieth century, so perhaps the twenty-first century is time for a course correct.
Charity starts at home which for many of us means our closest family. If everyone under our roof is happy and well taken care of, how can we spread the joy a little further? Taken to its furthest logical conclusion, “home” in the most basic sense, is the Earth. What are you doing for her this Christmas?
Your 4 year old might be desperate for that lego set, so at what stage do you choose between their joyful little grin and your own sense of “that’s going to take about 28,000 years to decompose”. What compromises would you feel comfortable making?
Unsurpringly, it’s the ephemeral parts of Christmas that are the most wasteful.
154 million crackers are pulled each year in the UK. We throw away 108m rolls of wrapping paper and 1.5bn christmas cards. 8.4m people in the UK struggle with some form of food poverty and Marcus Rashford is fighting the government to make sure underprivileged children don’t go hungry over the christmas holidays. Volunteering, lobbying government for food equity, contributions to food banks and charities to improve other peoples’ Christmases are the right thing to do - but for those of us fortunate enough to be comfortable, we should also check our own christmases. Do you really need all the trimmings, plus enough for seconds and thirds and turkey curry to last you until Easter? I don’t know how much food you buy for christmas, but given the reporting, I’m going to guess it’s too much.
We throw away the equivalent of 2m turkeys and 74 million mince pies. Take a moment to imagine a pile of 74 million mince pies. It’s a very big pile. Overall, that is 3m tonnes extra discarded produce, or 30% extra. Divide 3m tonnes by the UK’s current population of 68m and the reduction needed to keep our consumption to normal levels doesn’t seem to difficult. A Christmas compromise isn’t about denial and miserly-ness. It’s about thinking before buying. There are so many amazing ways to treat your loved ones whilst remaining mindful of resource boundaries.
I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here but gifts as experiences or memories rather than things are increasingly popular. Donations to a favourite charity are the best kind of positive gift you could make, but it’s true that most of us want to give a gift to the person we care about.
Given that 2020 was spent almost entirely at home, perhaps 2021 could be filled with places and doing? With a vaccine on the horizon communal activities can gradually resume. Before lockdown, classes such as pottery, cooking and painting were on the rise - a trend that will surely redouble in the coming months; galleries, theatres and cinemas will reopen as will landmarks like National Trust properties. Gifts such as memberships or courses dovetail nicely with the ‘reopening’ of society. For people itching to go somewhere new, contributions to a holiday fund are a nice idea - or if that somewhere new isn’t somewhere far flung there are always walking tours of local beauty spots and points of historical interest.
If you’re looking for something a bit more dramatic, sign your loved one(s) up to the Star Register and get their name etched in the heavens.
If we’re still somewhat restricted at the beginning of 2021 then plants, online subscriptions or online courses keep the home spruce and the mind active.
Where only an actual real life “thing” will do, there are plenty of options. Wooden toys, homemade crafty gifts, ethically produced goods or presents from companies that work towards positive impact or donate a portion of proceeds to charity - there’s an endless list of ways you can make your christmas spending count towards something good. The art of the Christmas compromise is choosing to spend your money responsibly rather than not spending your money at all.
There are myriad “Have a more sustainable Christmas” blogs out there so I hope this has added a little something to the mix in terms of reframing Christmas and how it need not be a toss up between “sustainable” and “not sustainable” - but rather a happy medium that suits you, your family, your community and the wider world. I’d love to hear what tweaks, decisions and changes you’re making to your 2020 Christmas …let me know.
One website I cannot recommend highly enough and a company I love working with is KINDpreneurs. The KINDpreneurs founder Karen Thomas set out to create an ethical online marketplace - the website only offers products with purpose that have a positive impact on people, planet or animals. Shop confidently and consciously by values you care about, whether that be eco friendly, sustainable, reusable, recycled, kind to others, mental health awareness, reducing poverty, fair trade, diversity and more.
It’s a wonderful resource and the perfect place to start your festively compromised Christmas shopping.
