Simple Sustainability: Simpler holidays

By Sky Trombly – The holiday season is now upon us. It’s easy to get swept up in it. Everywhere we go, whether the main street of town, piped into your car, or even into your home via cable or Netflix, the message is clear: Celebrate!

Nowhere is this more evident than in the stores. However, the call to celebrate is given in the common vernacular and is pronounced, most distinctly, as: “Shop!”

Now, I am no Grinch. There is a lot to be said for this time of year. People do tend to feel more joyful, more socially involved, more giving of their time, money, and energy to others. We see families spending more time together and people getting their creative juices flowing. Hard to find fault with all of this.

It is also a time of year where people experience a lot of anxiety, depression, and isolation. People also go into debt purchasing stuff for themselves and their family and friends that no one wants or needs. Most of this will be disposed of less than 6 months after purchase. Holiday returns often go to landfill because it is cheaper to toss the product than to return it to re-sellable condition.

The trick is surviving the holidays with your wits in tact while having the sort of holiday season that is  important to you and your family. I have a few suggestions to offer.

Prioritize

A useful first step is to figure out your priorities and decide what to focus your energy on. Some of us make the mistake of trying to “do it all” and it sucks the joy right out of the holiday.

While determining your priorities, determine your family member’s priorities as well. I had everyone determine their top 3 and my older kids were able to tell me what excites them the most.

We’re all a little different, obviously, and this is reflected in our priorities. By focusing on what matters most to us, we’re more likely to have satisfying holidays.

This is how the list roles out after I take everyone’s input into account:

• Activities Done Together

• Gifts

• Religious Observances

• Food

• Travel/Visiting

• Decorations

• Scents

• Music

Simplify

After you’ve discovered what you and yours value, you can still simplify in every category. I choose to pare down the most on things lowest on the list.

Activities Done Together

This could be anything, but neglecting this part diminishes the holiday like nothing else. This is where all the memories happen. Some things we like to do: bake and fry together, make holiday crafts, take pictures, read holiday books, watch specials or our family’s favorite movies, host and attend parties, play games, and so on.

Now, the trick is not to wear yourself out. We pick one activity a night to focus on. Most school breaks fall around Christmas and so an activity each day might be a tolerable pace. If the holiday is truncated for you (due to work demands, for example) a solution would be to focus on the most meaningful. Doing more than one a day is fine, but focusing on one at a time is usually better on stress levels.

Gifts:

I am not much of a gift-giver. I’d rather help people I love and spend time with them. As a dealer of words, I also am quite content telling the person how I feel. That all said, gift-giving is an important and valid love language and it is high up on our list because gift-receiving is important for my kids.

We’ve tried a system of four gifts for each of them: “something they want, something they need, something to wear, and something to read”. This worked out well last year, so we’re doing it again. We’ve also picked out 4 mini gifts that relate to the holiday (similar to stocking stuffers). We won’t wrap these smaller gifts to subtly deflate the fanaticism, but instead incorporate them into the night’s activity. For example, they each receive holiday books one night that we’ll then read to them.

Religious Observances:

This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and it is easy to have a completely secular holiday. Most holidays began from a religious observance and if this is a part of your life, embrace it in whatever way is meaningful to you.

Food

Keep holiday food prep very simple or involve friends and family in the process. If you’re the one in the kitchen while everyone else is celebrating, you know that this can deflate a lot of jolly. I no longer cook to impress.

Last year, we bought a gingerbread house kit and the boys and their dad built and ate it together. Decorating holiday cookies can be a blast (as long as everyone is also willing to help with the clean up). This year, we’re going to try air frying latkes and jelly doughnuts.

Travel/Visiting

When I asked our kids what they wanted from the holidays, they placed “travel” highly. They equated travel specifically with visiting.

We usually visit my in-laws over Christmas break. We drive so I don’t have much to say on simplifying travel but I will say that traveling light is a better option. You can try out a capsule wardrobe or challenge yourself to keep to one or two bags each. It definitely could save money and personal energy.

Decorations:

We don’t go crazy with decorating our home. We have one plastic box in which we put a holiday streamer, 3 strands of lights we frame our front windows with and menorahs. We also keep left-over candles.

We have another, similarly small box which my husband brings to his folk’s house with Christmas memorabilia/decorations in it. He hangs them up while we’re visiting over the Christmas holiday.

To keep our collection down, we employ these rules:

•Keep the collection to a box. (Or, if decorating is important to you, maybe a tote or two.) The point is to keep a lid on accumulation. It also makes finding decorations easier.

•Prefer reusable decorations over decorations intended to be thrown out. We buy very little each year to replace the consumables. Mostly, we buy candles.

•Avoid collections for the sake of collections. We started trying to collect tree ornaments every year for the kids. But we quickly began to feel little joy over the chore. We recognized that this habit wasn’t fulfilling and ditched it. They now have a couple special ones

they take to “Grandpa’s” tree.

•Decorate “public” rooms not private ones. You can cut down on a lot of decorations when you restrict your decorating to the living room, kitchen, and dining area. Who needs a Santa bed spread?

•Prefer seasonal decorations to holiday-specific ones. Not always possible, but some items, like kitchen towels with snowflakes can last all winter long.

Scents:

I love the way that the holidays smell. I buy a few scented candles every season. Winter is balsam fir season. Then the holiday itself will invariably have its own scent. Our home smells like a french fry joint.

Music:

As a mother of young children who hears Christmas music playing every where she goes, I know that silence can be golden. However, we do not have silent nights at our house.

Holiday CDs are largely things of the past. We employ the Internet and speakers to play our holiday music from my computer. There is nothing to pack away. I also put up a slide show (or screen saver) of us during holidays past so that the screen appears festive.

Wrap Up

Whatever you decide to do, make it a conscious decision and you’ll find greater joy and less stress over the holiday season.

Happy (Mindful) Holidays!