To think Christmas has descended into a pile of landfill?

Now back from B and M...appx 4 aisles of reduced xmas bits...light up houses for £1.50....elf outfits...santa outfits...most of it on the floor....Have yet to see a fairly wealthy friend who buys me a mountain of useless junk. Each year I get a bin bag full of useless games and toys [ no children at home ]...she sits on amazon and spends a lot of money on this stuff and i donate the lot. So depressing.

We stopped buying presents for everyone a couple of years ago. We don’t even buy our children presents. I painted these for my 3 year old son and my daughter had a handmade quilt made by a friend. They get presents from others but I’m not contributing to landfill any more.

@YellowPixie 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼superb post thank you

I'd like to say not in this house however while it doesn't apply to the gifts, it does apply to the packaging. An absolutely insane amount of packaging on the gifts and the food.

I feel that.
I do recycle as much as we can at home but it feels fucking pointless compared to the hauls of Shein and Temu shite that people flaunt as though it’s some kind of flex, small cheap bits of absolutely poor quality tat which will break by the end of its first use and be broken and binned along with the shitty plastic packaging it came in.
Atrocious.

We humans have become vermin.

YANBU. It’s just mindless, rampant consumerism.

I’ve filled a huge bag of toiletry sets to donate to a homeless shelter or women’s refuge, and another huge bag of chocolates to hand into a food bank or community cafe. And that’s stuff which can actually be used/eaten but the sheer amount of it was just overwhelming and unnecessary. I dread to think about all the plastic tat that’ll be just chucked in the bin.

What makes me feel even worse about it is that I can remember having similar debates about tat 40 years ago (I'm quite old).
Think of every piece of plastic in your home, your car, your workplace, used as a hidden material in construction. Every man-made fibre in your clothing. Times that by most of the people in the world. Each bit will outlast your children's great-grandchildren and more. Each piece will ultimately, over millenia, break into tiny pieces, and find its way into the sea, where it will play havoc with every layer of the food chain. We've buggered the whole planet... Ultimately it will recover, but life as we know it will be distant history.

Completely agree- we have never bought each other gifts or cards throughout our relationship - we agreed it very early on. We used to buy something for the house such as a table lamp if we saw one we liked.
So much less stressful!

I totally agree. Our adult DC don't want tat or stuff so they mostly have some edible treats, some money and something useful like walking socks or a garden plant.

DH and I have a rule that only books, preferably secondhand, and an edible treat are acceptable. We use gift bags which get reused year after year.

I avoid shops like B&M as far as possible, they just depress me, especially from September onwards.

I agree OP and I resisted a lot this year all round the children didn’t get surprise top up gifts they got what they asked for which was not a lot.

I have berated myself a little as I got some more baubles and lights which I’m
not keen on when they’ve gone up. So I am guilty here.

Today I’ve looked through the cupboards and freezer and we have less food and booze left over. I have meticulously planned meals around what is left and reduced my shops to 50-60 per week for just fresh items. Much less wasted.

I could not think of anything worse than going to a shop or restaurant anywhere but my cosy home - but I am at that age

Wholeheartedly agree- it makes me feel so anxious and miserable. I get round that horrible feeling by just avoiding as much of it as possible. It obviously informs my choices for what gifts I buy for my family. I avoid the shops as much as possible in the lead-up to Christmas, and I just become quite a homebody in general in late November and through December. I don’t use Instagram or TikTok and I don’t spend much time with others outside of my family so I just don’t see it- ignorance is bliss! I can’t change other people’s behaviour so I just hide from it all I’m afraid. (Though I still obviously see some of the ridiculous decorations on people’s houses- those inflatable Christmas figures and massive plastic penguins etc give me the low-level rage).

I am glad that my family have finally stopped with the, "...but you MUST have something to open on the day!" and started giving me money instead of ornaments that require extra dusting, and novelty socks which don't last very long.

I prefer giving (and receiving) useful presents, like money, clothes, books, or something related to their hobby (if the recipients ask for specific things). It might not mean mountains of presents, but at least they will come in handy and won't go to waste!

Completely agree. It’s not just Christmas, it’s life. The older I get, the more I realise that we spend our lives chasing meaningless bollocks - plastic crap, bigger TVs, pointless consumer crap that we think we need. It’s very difficult not to get caught up in, or to not conclude that the human race is fucked (and needs to become extinct).

While I completely agree. I also think what some (most I hope) see as cheap tat may be the only things that some can afford. For example my sister sees a bunch of cheap presents looks and may be feels better than one modest one for her dc.

We've really paired back in the last few years. We have had the same Xmas decorations for at least 5 years and I do buy a new one each year to mark the year. Bit of a random family tradion that's been passed down. One dc's main gift was a console and the accessories but was second hand. The toddler dc had less than 20 quid spent on them and it was mainly learning toys/magnets. Dh and I did have one major present each but they were purchases we were going to make anyway and just kept back for Xmas.

I think environmentally we could do more of course. We keep and reuse gifts bags (not to be cheap but hate wasting them) we buy second hand where possible and avoid mass produced tat as much as we can but it does still filter in (looking at a Santa rubber ducky). We only buy food in quantity that won't be wasted and use left overs. I try to avoid the over plasticky (sp?) Packaged foods but that's hard to do. Why can we get potatoes and carrots in America in paper bags with string stitching but it's mainly plastic here? I have found paper bagged potatoes and buy those now but they are more expensive than the run of the mill ones.

Sorry I started ranting. Will keep trying to reduce waste as much as possible. That's my news year resolution anyway.

I’ve felt like this for years and seeing Christmas gifts in charity shops in January makes it worse. Now I give gift vouchers so they can get something they rather want

Only plastic here is Lego!
Maybe it’s because DC are grown up - presents are clothes, fragrances, food, experiences, books and games mainly
Some of my decorations are 40 years old - although did buy a new tree this year as the old one was 20+ years old

We've been virtually "buying our own" presents for decades, even from before we were married. Well not physically buying them, but discussing and agreeing beforehand, so we know about 90% of our presents in advance. Since marriage, we buy using the joint bank account, so effectively buying our own, even if we don't physically buy our own (but a lot of the time we go shopping together!). Thinking back, it was probably our second Christmas since we got together, certainly before living together, that we just agreed what we'd buy each other and for our first Xmas, we barely spent anything as we'd only just got together so gifts were pretty cheap and minimal. Who says romance is dead? But it works for us. I absolutely hate waste, whether money or resources and have openly returned many gifts for refunds in the past when it was something I really didn't want, whether for me, DH or our son. When I wanted a piece of jewelry, I far rather preferred to go and choose myself rather than want a "surprise" from DH even though he's really good a choosing and knowing what I'd like, I still prefer to chose my own! As the years have passed, we buy less and less each year and just buy what we want/need as and when we need it, so Xmas presents these days are pretty nominal like a box of my favourite chocolates, a few containers of my favourite toiletries, etc.

@RedRiverShore6 my spouse bought me glazes for my hobby and I bought him new power tools. Nothing wasteful or fanciful there. People do whatever works for them.

I’ll add to the mumsnet bingo and tell you my children got something they want / need / wear / read.

Why do spouses and partners buy each other Christmas presents, that really is a waste.

Sadly there are too many people who say 'not my problem', well no it isn't because they will be long dead when the shit really hits the fan big time.
It'll be the kids today being born and young kids alive now then their kids who will suffer all the shit we're doing now, but a lot of people who supposedly love their kids carry on shitting on the planet regardless...the two don't equate.

OP if there is a serious problem and you’re not just musing on Mn there is a specific type of anxiety this relates to called climate or ego anxiety.

obviously the first stage of getting better from
anxiety is learning to accept with the lack of control over the problem

It’s a bit odd go view this through the lenses of people who post on social media v people who don’t.
Obviously for the people who don’t have social media for you to look at you have no idea what they’re buying?!

YANBU generally, but we can all "opt out" ourselves by not buying all the crap. We can't control what others do, but we can do our own thing.

We've got virtually nothing going into landfill this year as we simply stopped buying crap a while ago, whether it be gifts, wrapping, food, etc. We just don't buy what we don't need and recycle whatever we can, including saving wrapping paper from this year's gifts for next year (well the larger pieces anyway). With food and drink, we menu plan and only buy what we need and make sure we use up all the "leftovers" in some way, so the only landfill will be things like turkey inners and skin, half eaten food off the plate, etc. Nothing will get uneaten due to going out of date.

For gifts, we just buy each other what we know we'll need and use, no plastic crap, no gimmick gifts, just clothes, toiletries, chocolates, maybe jewelry, maybe after shave/perfume etc.

Even when DS was very young, we didn't buy him loads of plastic crap for presents, nor allowed relatives etc to buy it. Gifts were things that we knew he'd get a lot of use out if and we didn't buy sackloads of "stuff". Quantity over quality!

We've been doing all that for years, but really excelled ourselves this year as we didn't need to buy any gift wrap and even re-used Christmas cards for each other from previous years (we keep them all and we each randomly chose one from a previous year!). All gifts are useful and needed and WILL be used up prior to disposal of the containers etc in the recycling bins - things we'd have bought for ourselves anyway if we'd not been given them as presents.

Unfortunately the rise of the ‘influencer’ on YouTube just adds fuel to the fire. My jaw is on the ground now week after week starting November they’re vlogging their Christmas hauls and the crazy thing is many of them did it year after year and I really don’t know where they put 8 weeks worth of haul! The comments are flooded with people congratulating them on how ‘cute’ their items were when honestly week after week it’s the same tat ex pet from different stores and then they go back for round 2 to the same stares with titles like ‘second drop from B&M’ etc. Makes me feel ill but I hate watch them - can’t look away like a rubber necker lol 😅