a green christmas

By that, of course, I mean a holiday season filled with environmental consciousness and sustainable practices. Now that is the kind of holiday season I can actually feel myself looking forward to.

Now, I know that it is only the middle of October, and usually I get all worked up when people start hyping up Christmas two months early, but this year I actually need to start thinking about it now. Joel and my brothers and I have made a pact to do Christmas differently this year, so it's going to take some extra time, but in a good way. We are having a corporate- and commercial-free Christmas. HURRAY! That means the whole thing is going to be as Do-It-Yourself as possible (gifts, decorations, food, etc). We can still buy some things, since realistically you'd need to start making stuff in June to get it all done by Christmas (we came up with this idea in September, so we were too late for that). The deal, though, is that anything store-bought needs to be either made by local craftspeople or be fair trade products by international craftspeople (i.e. stuff from Ten Thousand Villages counts) or support positive change in the world (like the CD Instant Karma, for example).

I am excited about this, which is a joyous feeling in itself, because to be perfectly honest I haven't really looked forward to Christmas or even liked Christmas since 2002. My grandmother was the Christmas Spirit embodied in a physical form. Every year she and my grandfather came to visit us at Christmas. She made Christmas cookies and put them in Christmas tins. She brought more gifts than Santa could shake a stick at, and they were always wrapped like they had appeared in the holiday edition of Martha Stewart Living. She scouted stores and bakeries for the best fruitcake. She loved sitting at the dining room table with my brothers and I as we all made new tree ornaments and other Christmas crafts. My grandmother was Christmas, so when she passed away in the fall of 2003, it felt like Christmas passed away with her. We've tried to revive some of the traditions, but it hasn't been the same. We've tried to create new traditions, but nothing has really stuck. Christmas started to get depressing.

To make matters worse, I was working at a mall in the holiday season of 2003. I had to listen to Christmas music all day every day. Holiday shoppers yelled at me. I watched as they yelled at each other. People spent hundreds of dollars at my store alone, and always asked for gift reciepts so the things could be returned. Sure enough, the first week of January, everything came back. The mall was so busy, and people were so stressed and frazzled and mean, and everybody spent so much money on stuff that it turned out no one wanted anyway, that I actually wanted to stop celebrating Christmas all together. In fact, it occured to me that celebrating Christmas in this out-of-controll consumeristic way went against everything I even believed in. It was bad for the spirit, it was bad for the world. The only thing it was doing at all was putting money in the pockets of big corporate businessmen, and seeing as it was their marketing teams that turned Christmas into the spend-fest it had become, they were the last people in the world I wanted to be financially supporting. I turned into the Grinch. I hated Christmas, and every year I told myself that I wouldn't go into a mall after November 1st, but every year I ended up feeling like I had no choice. So, I would go into the mall and become stressed and frazzled and spend too much money, and then I would be bitter because I had caved and gone against my principles.

Last year, when Joel and Christopher and I were living in the soul-sucking wasteland of Suburbia, we started some traditions that actually turned into a lot of holiday fun, like a homemade gingerbread house, homemade egg nog, and old-fashioned popcorn-string tree garlands. This year is like an extention of all that! I already have some ideas for gifts (which I would post, except my brothers are probably the most faithful readers of my blog, and I don't want to let out any secrects...) The exciting thing is that none of my gift ideas require going to a mall at all. They do force me to be creative and resourceful, though (imagine, Christmas gifts that will bring out my good side!) I think we're finally finding a way to return Christmas to it's old ideals: giving, not getting, time with loved ones instead of just shopping for them, peace on earth and good will to men and all that other stuff that lives on only in Christmas music.

I can't believe this...it's October and I'm excited for Christmas. I feel like I'm five years old again!