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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

to dislike 'Look how many presents my children have' posts?

133 replies

LooptheL00p · 15/12/2016 13:32

I've just seen the first one of the year pop up on Facebook, a picture of a living room absolutely full of toys, not even wrapped yet, captioned 'How am I going to wrap all of this?!'. I feel a (possibly unreasonable) amount of disdain towards these pictures!
I don't really mind how many presents people buy for their children, or if the pictures are more about the pretty wrapping/Christmas magic. But 'Look how much I've bought'?! It just seems common and somewhat of a pointless competition of oneupmanship to post online 🙄. Am I crazy or does this irritate others as well?

OP posts:
somethinglikethis · 17/12/2016 09:49

When I see a huge pile of presents the only thing I wonder is "how long will it take to unwrap them??? And where will they put everything????"

But then I'm still scarred by the first Christmas we had dc and I went ridiculously overboard and wrapped everything individually and it took days to unwrap everything as ds got bored. And then being surrounded by stuff not knowing where to put it all.

This year I'm organised. I've got storage all ready for what I know they are getting from us.

SpringerS · 17/12/2016 10:02

I must admit I don't get how people can stick their heads in the sand, spend thousands on their kids and not even do a fucking shoebox for those less fortunate.

Tbh, those Shoebox things are just about the worst way to give to charity for numerous reasons. First off, apart from emergency supplies, you should never, ever, ever send goods into a fragile economic system. There will be be local workers producing and selling toys, toiletries, etc and by bringing in and handing out Western goods you put them out of business. In an economy where being in business is literally a matter of life and death. Imagine that you had just donated money and the money had been used to make an order for toys with a local producer. Now that money has been used to boost their business and the livelihoods of the people who supply them with raw materials. Those suppliers and producers now have money to spend in their economy and boost other businesses around them. The children have still gotten toys and the local businesses are thriving.

Secondly, the Shoebox appeals are nearly always run by religious evangelists who only give the toys to children who agree to pray to their version of Jesus in exchange for gifts. In many cases the children have hours of sermons to sit through for weeks on end before they are rewarded for their new religious devotion with a box of cheap western bits and bobs and loads of added leaflets about how it's all from Jesus. It's really disgusting.

And lastly, there is also an environmental cost of sending these boxes across the world. Fair enough if it's emergency supplies or medicine. But when it's just unnecessary tat that's been used to undermine the local cultural mores with fundamentalist Western religious ideas while potentially destroying parts of a local economy. It's a bad, bad idea.

The only genuinely effective way to donate is to research the best charity working in the are you want to give to. And then give them cold hard cash. It mightn't give you the warm and fuzzies in the same way as buying a bunch of items with generous intent does. But it lets you help without harming.

MiladyThesaurus · 17/12/2016 10:15

What I'm wondering is how people can be posting their presents under the tree pictures at this point. Surely this is a moan for Christmas Eve when people will actually be assembling their present mountains.

Even if you have a present mountain for each child, presumably it'll all be stashed somewhere at the moment.

DebbieFiderer · 17/12/2016 10:33

Milady, not everyone keeps their presents hidden until the big day. Ours are all under the tree already, partly for storage and partly because it increases the anticipation, seeing them there and wondering what is inside.

MiladyThesaurus · 17/12/2016 10:41

I bet most of the present mountain builders are hiders til Christmas Eve though.

You wouldn't want to have to squeeze round mountains of presents for a week and a half before you open them. Most people's living rooms are not big enough to display several hundred wrapped boxes. It would be a logistical nightmare and very stressful to try to live with.

So my guess is that the people who display presents early are much less likely to be those going totally overboard.

NameChanger22 · 17/12/2016 10:44

It's fine to dislike stuff. The solution has always been to stay clear of it, why are other people's present piles any different?

MrsMattBomer · 17/12/2016 13:10

SpringerS

Try reading my other post. The shoeboxes go to local kids who have nothing, not half way around the world.

1horatio · 17/12/2016 13:23

bomer

May I ask which charity that's connected to? Would be great for when DD is older. To teach her that other children don't have pretty much everything they want and certainly not everything they need.

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