Outside In | Merry Christmas, may the “stuff” not be with you

At various stages in the year, I make my own quiet protests against our planet-destroying obsession with “stuff.”

Today, as you nestle into Christmas Eve cocktails, or a massive family dinner and excited young kids restive to discover what “stuff” Santa will leave at the foot of the bed overnight, I am doing my own highly personalised version of “Scrooge.”

Actually, I don’t see myself as Scrooge. Let’s just say I’m indulging in my own version of Christmas excess – an excess that I hope is doing much less harm to our environment than the average “stuff-laden” festive season, where those of us that are affluent enough – and a lot that are not – end up buried under mountains of stuff we neither need, nor in many cases even want.

In Joel Waldfogel’s 2009 book Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays, this “total deadweight loss of Christmas” in the United States alone is more than US$12 billion.

When I was a kid, Christmas (and birthday) “stuff” had real relevance and significance.

In the tough post-war years, my hard-pressed parents struggled most weeks just to get by. Saving for our Christmas (I was the oldest of five kids, so we had a long list of naughty and nice wishes) began pretty much as soon as the new year began.