A Holiday Gift Tradition That Will Boost Your Resilience
And the provide the perfect excuse to belatedly introduce yourself to your neighbors
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…
