We’re All Consumers. This Holiday Season, Push Back.
How to shop from the trove of things that are already around you
Every year around the middle of December, I become convinced that I haven’t done enough for Christmas. This is, of course, nonsense. It’s the onslaught of last-minute sale emails, dire warnings about shipping times, and the steady drip of social media making me feel like I need to sprinkle on more glitter and make more magic happen.
A well oiled machine is working hard to extract my dollars—and yours. “The reason we’re consumers is because we’re in a system that’s designed to make us consume,” J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Day the World Stops Shopping told me over Zoom. “We should be a lot more forgiving of ourselves than we are.”
This year it’s especially easy to fall prey to the weight of Christmas expectations because last year so many people limited their travel because of the pandemic, the persistent idea that supply chain issues will make it impossible to buy gifts, and now, because of the fresh wave of uncertainty that the omicron variant is bringing to the holiday party.
Resist. The notion that Christmas is overcommercialized dates back to the 1800s, and gift giving itself arose out of Puritanical pearl clutching over excessive merriment. We just don’t need more…
