Year Without Shopping

In honor of Boxing Day, and in the spirit of maintaining a portion of the original purpose of this blog, and also in honor of the fact that I want my house to be neat again, I gathered up all the cardboard boxes still in here this evening.  The photos below represent the cardboard I needed to throw away today, including stuff that had little to do with Christmas, and excluding some boxes that I threw away yesterday.

I took it to the grocery store and weighed it.  That’s a lie.  I wanted to, but I didn’t.  I’d guess it weighed about ten pounds.  My friend graciously offered to take it to his house to put it out with the recycling, and I said sure.  By the time I gave it to him, it was crammed all the way full.  The thought of every house in the US having at least that much cardboard to get rid of after Christmas bothers me, considering how many of them will just let it go to the dump and then never think about it again.

I’ve been criticized for participating in the annual gift frenzy, and I wonder what your take on it is.  In my case, I buy my son a lot of stuff for Christmas, and then I am pretty prudent when it comes to stuff he might think he wants throughout the year.  I don’t usually need to buy him clothes more than twice a year.  Once at Christmas, and maybe once in the summer.  I make the things I buy for Christmas purposeful:  I don’t buy him stuff just so he has stuff, I buy him toys to match his new developmental stage, clothes to fit his growing little self, books and games, and movies and tv shows on dvd, since we don’t have cable.  I try to be equally purposeful about what I buy other people.  I don’t want to be accused of giving anyone clutter.  I try to give consumables when I can.  

So what’s your take?  Does participating in Christmas in the traditional American sense mean that you’re a mindless consumer?  Does it spoil children?  And does it increase what goes into landfills, or just make it happen all at once rather than over time?

And by the way, yes, I know Boxing Day has nothing to do with boxes.  It’s about pugilism, of course.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Daily Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.