Here comes the next part of our Christmas shopping season series!
Buy Nothing Christmas, at the first glance, may seem strange for anyone who first heard of the term. We always try to give our family & friends the best gifts in the Christmas holiday, there are also many sale days in this season, why buy nothing?
Well, it makes sense!
According to Wikipedia, Buy Nothing Christmas started unofficially in 1968, when Ellie Clark and her family decided to publicly disregard the commercial aspects of the Christmas holiday. Contemporarily, a movement was created to extend Adbusters' Buy Nothing Day into the entire Christmas season. Buy Nothing Christmas first became official in 2001 when a small group of Canadian Mennonites created a website and gave the movement a name. Adbusters in 2011 renamed the event Occupy Xmas, a reference to the Occupy movement.
Buy Nothing Day was first joined with Adbusters' Buy Nothing Christmas campaign. Shortly after, Lauren Bercovitch, the production manager at Adbusters Media Foundation, publicly embraced the principles of Occupy Xmas, advocating "something as simple as buying locally—going out and putting money into your local economy—or making your Christmas presents".
Previously, the central message of Occupy Xmas and Occupy Christmas differed in that Occupy Xmas called for a "Buy Nothing Christmas" and Occupy Christmas called for support of the local economy, artists, and craftspeople in holiday shopping. The union of these ideologies calls for a Buy Nothing Day to kick off a season of supporting the local economy and family.
Buy Nothing Christmas suggests that, instead of buying a pile of glitzy presents, give a personal gift. That could involve giving someone a gift of your artwork, a collection of meaningful photos, a collection of favorite family recipes, a shared trip to a movie, a coupon for babysitting to new parents, a charitable donation in the giftee's name, etc.
When you do buy things, Enns encourages you to remember principles like buying locally-produced, fairly-traded products with environmentally friendly or no packaging. Recycling or reusing is also a good principle to keep in mind when considering Christmas gifts.
We hope our handmade vase could be one of the gifts worth buying on this day!
