A Holiday Gift Tradition That Will Boost Your Resilience

And the provide the perfect excuse to belatedly introduce yourself to your neighbors

Photo: Tatiana Maksimova/Getty Images

I’ve always felt that buying holiday or Christmas gifts is mostly a drag. It feels forced and expected in a way that, for me, takes much of the joy of gift-giving out of the occasion.

Then there’s the fact that the times we’re living in don’t exactly scream festive cheer. It can feel discordant to browse online gift-giving guides while dodging headlines about the climate, Covid, and refugees.

But there’s a certain kind of gift-giving that feels both delightfully unexpected, while also being a sane response to the perilous times we live in — and that’s making something and giving it to your immediate neighbors.

I got thinking about this when I recently interviewed Tyson Yunkaporta, an Aboriginal scholar and the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World for my newsletter, What Do We Do Now That We’re Here. He told me that in all the talk about changing the world, correcting injustice, saving the planet, and even prepping for a scary future, few of us seem to do the most obvious and elemental act: Meeting our own damn neighbors.

Prepping is all about practicing your relational skills and actually making meaningful connections and networks in your neighborhoods. Because really that’s where the loaves and fishes trick happens when the scarcity hits. That human pattern just emerges. There is a kind of dynamic where, even in real scarcity, everyone gets just what they need and then everyone works together to build up an abundance again. This is what we see in mutual aid activism all over the world right now.

That’s the infrastructure that we need to be preparing, that infrastructure of relationships.

Now, I’m the first to admit that introducing yourself to your neighbors can be easier than it sounds. Perhaps you moved in somewhere with good intentions of making friends or acquaintance with them. Then you got busy, and things got awkward, and you were sure that the appropriate window of taking over some muffins had passed. So now you simply smile and nod in passing, hoping to not make a fuss.