A Better Kind of Holiday

I feel badly about the dire state of the retailers this holiday season. I’m sorry so many of them are struggling and so many more are closing their doors. I know this time of year is often their only time to be profitable. I feel badly that I didn’t help their cause at all----not in the least----not once. That’s because I don’t buy presents anymore. No one in our family exchanges gifts and we’re very happy about it.

We didn’t always do it this way of course. The first time we thought about the idea of foregoing the exchange of gifts, we got scared and, at the last minute, bought things for each other. It’s interesting how unsettled we all were at not having gifts to open. What would we do on Christmas Eve? Would we feel sad? Deprived? Then, add the fact that we’d always given gifts to one another, we just couldn’t break a long-standing tradition.

The next year we decided to try the idea on again. I think it came up for review because most of the gifts I had gotten from my sister and her family the year before I didn’t particularly like, or didn’t use, or they didn’t fit. I also had noticed that the rather hard-to-find item for her kitchen that I had searched all over for and paid quite a bit of money for has never been seen again. So the discussion of not buying presents for the upcoming holidays was pretty welcome. This time, however, my sister put forth the idea of giving our money to someone who needed it. That’s when the concept stuck.

Each year now my sister finds a family in need; each year we hope to make their holidays a bit brighter; and each year we feel good as well. Do we suffer from deprivation on Christmas Eve? Heck no. We watch movies, play games, eat----it never occurs to us that we’re NOT opening any presents. I don’t have to have a feng shui crisis about what to do with this stuff----Is it clutter? Should I re-cycle or re-gift? I don’t have to feel badly about all the wrapping paper being thrown in a land-fill somewhere. I don’t have to ponder the question as to whether there is an appropriate length of time to keep a gift that you have no intention of using/wearing. Of course, this no-gift plan probably wouldn’t work so well if there were still little kids in our family. But as adults, it’s a perfect one-size-fits all concept.

Although the retailers had not been dependent on the spending habits of me and my family for the past few years, I nevertheless feel badly about their plight. The irony around the family who received our gift of money is that they owned a retail store which they had to close due to the bad economic times. Add to that their seven children and the husband with a serious medical condition, it was looking like the holidays for them was going to be pretty grim. Perhaps our small influx of well-wishes helped to ease their worries for a time.