How We’re Trying to Celebrate Sustainably While Holding on to What Matters Most

I had my annual Christmas tantrum, yesterday. It happens every year, as the list of stuff on my plate grows, and the time shrinks, and I--the mother around here--am nagging everybody, everywhere, every day, then finally reach my breaking point, and cancel Christmas. And then everybody has a big family talk, and they all agree that they'll help more, and I begrudgingly uncancel Christmas. The tension points are pretty much the same as during the rest of the year: too much to do, too much stress, and some members of our household are better at living in the moment than looking ahead and preparing for coming events (preparing food for dinner, preparing the yard for snowfall, cleaning gutters before rain, etc.) And at Christmas it's SO much more. There are the cards and the gifts to prepare, the house to clean and decorate, the various foods to prepare ahead of time, and all that time the necessary positivity-building; the encouragement and ensuring that these activities are happy. The days when I just got it all done myself are behind me now. So I am mostly the whip-cracker, and that role makes me miserable, as well as everybody else.

So every year on Mama's Tantrum Day (no, there's no actual date for this, but there's some guarantee it will happen in early December), some little thing pushes me over the edge, I yell at somebody or break down in tears, storm away, and then eventually come out to apologize, and calmly explain that if people want Christmas, we need to get some things done, and I can't do it all myself. Then they all make a truly good effort at not only preparing for Christmas, but also developing some real joy for the rest of the season. The resentful mutterings are quieter, and I slink off to my little corner of guilt and shame. This is not ever how I envisioned what in my heart is the happiest time of year. But it's the price of creating that illusion. As the years go by the tantrums are milder and the celebrations are easier, but that isn't the end of it.

Lately we're facing another foe to Christmas joy: the veil of innocent shopping sprees has been lifted from our eyes by the recent parade of floods, fires, storms, droughts, and disasters. Now we really just can't deny the fact that Christmas is unsustainable! We've known for decades that consumerism (including buying gifts) was destroying our future, but have been unable to break out of that tradition for various reasons (AKA various people's hearts being broken at the thought of not buying gifts). Add to that the gas spent on extra travel and shipping, the money we don't have that we borrow from the future to fulfill expectations, the imported foods that are a part of every December in our household, the new decorations, new candles, and total abandoning of our efforts at non-consumerism in order to over-fill stockings just so they look "right".

So this year I decided to see if we can dig down to the heart of what's important to us, and focus our time, effort, expense and expectation onto just those things that matter most. We wrote down the truly gigantic list of things we normally do at Christmas time, and sorted them into categories: what we would be happier without, what we don't care about either way, what we enjoy but could live without, and what we feel our hearts absolutely need to enjoy the season. The results were interesting.

My daughter had to make a special list item for "dogs everywhere", which I had never realized was an important part of Christmas at all, but now that I think about it, those fluffy smiling faces enjoying the gathering of family is really a traditional part of our celebration. I personally realized that I like making paper stars, but not hanging them in most of the windows, and it turns out nobody else likes them either. This was a part of both my partner and my childhood traditions, so we never questioned it. Now we know! Every single person had the same things at the top of the list: the wild tree we annually collect from our neighbours' driveway (we consider it sustainable because it's doomed, there, already), along with decorating and music and family gatherings. 

And gifts? They didn't register on three out of the four top lists! In fact, my son had them on the "rather not have" list, although opening his stocking was still enjoyable, and then followed by a feeling of guilt. My daughter, however, had gifts near the top of her list. This major discrepancy led to a lot of conversation in our home. It turns out we all carry so much ecologically-rooted guilt associated with consumerism that gift-giving has become stressful. We imagine it would be just fine if people gave gifts that were truly needed, like boot repairs, or the mixer my partner refurbished for his mother after she broke her arm. He gave her the gift of still being able to bake. Or time. Time together is the gift everybody in my household loves. It was consistently in the "can't be happy without this" category of our experiment. Singing with the family, gathering for anything and everything--those were also at the top of the list. Heartbreakingly so, during this time of pandemic restrictions, but knowing this means we have to find more ways to be together, safely.

This list activity has given us some great conversation and helped us to focus our hearts on what matters. We are boldly acknowledging that overspending on time, money or our future is absolutely not OK, and now we have a way forward out of this mess: Togetherness. A wild tree. Singing and playing music. Those things at the top of the lists are what we'll focus on, knowing now that our hearts will be filled without those things at the bottom.