Hope everyone's having a wonderful holiday season! I am quite happy with my gift-giving this year; instead of giving piles of "stuff," it was much more fitting to my values. These are some of the things I did:
- Buying fair trade. In previous years, I've tended to buy fairly-traded crafts (or coffee, chocolate, etc) only for recipients who I know would appreciate their origin. But this year, I decided to widen the scope dramatically, and everybody was fair game. It doesn't matter that my uncle couldn't care less what the person who made his present was paid; I care.
- Giving money or experiences rather than items. My sister is planning a trip with her friends this summer, so what she really wanted was money towards that. I can treat my boyfriend or other friends to a trip, a play, a concert together rather than a "thing."
- Giving to charity on people's behalf. There's only a limited number of friends and relatives who this can fly with, but for those people, I went with it.
- Making personal, frugal presents. From baking cookies to burning CD mixes, I substituted time and effort in place of shopping for some people.
I couldn't completely escape the commercialism of the holidays, but on the whole I'm pretty proud of how I did this time around. How about you?
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1 comment:
This was the first Xmas where I gifted to a friend a donation to the Lupus Foundation in her name. Someone close to her has lupus, and she's the type who gets whatever she needs for herself, so this was one of the best gifts I've ever given her!
-myPFblog
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