To think Christmas has descended into a pile of landfill?

[TheLostMonopolyTopHat]

I’ll start by saying this way of thinking is getting me down. I find it overwhelming and depressing as it takes the magic away but I can’t unsee it.

Everywhere you look there’s Christmas tat. As I was shopping in the lead up all I could see was shelves and shelves of total shit: plastic stocking fillers that wouldn’t last two minutes, plastic toys that’ll sit in landfill long after the children who receive them have grown up, plastic polyester Christmas pyjamas for the whole family you’ll wear for one night, Temu shit, SHEIN shit, loads of shit. People buying ‘token gifts’ or secret Santa crap, new colour themed decorations every year, shelves full of cheap stuff, it never ends.

I used to get swept up in it but the past few years I’ve found myself struggling to buy toys children in the family ask for because it’s adding to the destruction of the planet. I, like everyone else, have been guilty of buying things for the sake of buying and I hate it.

Christmas has become a consumerist hellscape. How much worse will it get? We’re all full of microplastics yet very few people seem to stop and think before buying it all only to chuck it all away.

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.

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!

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.

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.

We humans have become vermin.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Not if you buy things they actually want/need. It's nice to buy gifts for people you love. The gifts don't have to be tat or expensive.

Yes, it's bad that so much plastic tat is produced, but I don't see what these endless halo-polishing, hand-wringing threads bemoaning the shopping habits of 'poor, stupid people' actually achieve, apart from allowing OPs to wallow in a sense of moral superiority disguised as woe.

This year and last Christmas I found it really difficult to go shopping for presents. The sheer amount of stuff in the shops combined with the fact DC didn't need a lot made it hard to buy anything. I tried to keep the volume of waste and tat to a minimum, recycle what I can.

It juat feels like a never ending cycle of consumerism. I don't want to be part of it. I certainly don't want anyone to buy me things for the sake of it.

I just want time with my family and time on my own. I don't want it in the form of a themed bubble bath set with comedy accessories etc etc.

You must get loads of presents to have all those, do you not tell people you don't want them, do you buy gifts for other people, do people that buy you these gifts get a gift from you. We don't really have gifting in our house, DS gets money so he can buy what he wants and that's about it.

I agree with a lot of your points but who is only wearing Christmas pyjamas for one night? Mine get a new pair at the beginning of December and then wear them until they don’t fit any more. They still wear the ones from 2 christmas’ ago.

I agree, there is so much wastage it's actually disgusting. We try in our house to minimise it but we are probably also responsible for more than we'd like.

I try and buy less and keep longer in terms of clothes and housing stuff. I am awful for food wastage though.

This Christmas i decided not to get a load of tat. And also bought secondhand books (so much cheaper) my children have additional needs and you can get secondhand equipment much cheaper than new and often in perfect condition.

They had things they wanted, things they needed. My wider family also decided on less tat too. It worked really well.

I bought my dc xmas pjs 2 yrs ago & they are still using them. And yes we are a tall family so my dc have grown but I bought them too big. I don’t understand why every Christmas new ones are needed.

I did buy some gold baubles from the Range but that’s because I dropped my old ones which happened to be glass & didn’t want to spend a lot on new glass ones.

We experienced it differently. Three adult home, we go a bit crazy at Christmas, but only within the limits of our disposable incomes.

As we were opening presents, we had two bags for (one for general bin, one for recyclable bin) rubbish and another pile for cardboard (to take to the tip).

this year we had half a small rubbish bag bound for land fill (mainly the wrapping paper from presents others bought us) and managed to squeeze our recyclable stuffing into one large black bag. And a load of cardboard that went to the recyclable tip.

I commented about how firms seem to have stopped using that polystyrene stuff to pack things more secure but now seem to use cardboard.

I know I cannot guarantee that things we recycle will not go into landfill, but we try.

maybe the next step for us is to find out what our council does with our recycling, or rather, I suppose, what the business our council contracts with, does with our recycling.

I'm with you, OP. ❤️

I can no longer stand the kind of stuff that's on sale that is geared towards people wondering what to get for x person, because they've got to get "something".

It all seems such a pointless waste because you know the crap is just going to languish in the back of a cupboard. Or get regifted if the recipient also feels the need to give presents.

For years now I've avoided cards which have wrapped presents on them because I hate that it's about spending money on mindless buying. I've even stopped buying wrapping paper, and either wrap things in the brown paper that comes in parcels, saved up over time, or I put things in pillowcases.

This year was mostly gift free, both giving and receiving, and it was so much less stressful!

Because it’s a special occasion and we enjoy giving/receiving presents? DP bought me jewellery and I bought him a perfume and an ‘experience’ gift. There was no “waste”.

Not in our house. We use the much hated poem and buy as ethically as possible. Most gifts for DC over the years have been second-hand.

My family has never really done this; just a few small/consumable items and we often reuse paper/gift bags etc. I don't really understand the whole panic buying madness if I'm honest, I just stay far away from the shops November onwards. I'm still wondering who the people are who buy all new decorations every year though because no-one ever admits to this 😆

I made the vast majority of my presents this year - all edibles such as cranberry sauce, tomato chutney etc in recycled glass jars. Went down really well with friends and family and I enjoyed making in all!!

That seems an unnecessarily negative outlook. How do you know that these things won't be used, loved, and passed on? One man's tat is another man's treasure.

I think people are much more conscious of being a responsible consumer than they used to be. Plus we now have the secondary market through things like eBay. And many things are recycled. There are also more biodegradable plastics now.

Anyway, even if none of these things were true, there's nothing you can do about it, so no point thinking about it if it brings you down.

ETA: You say that "very few" people seem to stop and think, and that they buy things and then chuck them away. You have no way of knowing this at all, it's just negative gloom-and-doom thinking.

Thing is our whole economy relies on people consuming. That’s what capitalism is. We need a wholesale change as we can’t go on like this but what’s the alternative system?