One family’s daring experiment Christmas without all the stuff by Colin Beavan
If Christmas is about presents, then in 2007, my little family and I had no Christmas. I mean, we had the caroling and the uncle playing the piano and the cousins running around with my three-year-old, Isabella, and the grandfather coaxing her to sit on his lap and the good food.
We had, in other words, an amazingly good time.
What we didn’t have, though, was the average American’s $800 hole in our bank accounts, gouged out by Christmas-present spending. Nor did we have the credit card debt still unpaid by June. Nor the forcing of smiles for gifts we didn’t really want. Nor the buying of extra luggage to bring home those unwanted gifts. Nor the stressful rush of last-minute crowds at the mall.
Without presents, you see, we didn’t have the sensation that I, at least, normally associated with Christmas—the stress. And without stress or presents, it’s not Christmas, right? But of course it was. It was the best of Christmas, the part that, research shows, makes people happiest. It was all the upside without the downside.
Let me back up.
From November 2006 to November 2007, I and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—embarked on a lifestyle experiment in which we tried to live with the lowest possible environmental impact (you can read about it on my blog NoImpactMan.com). Among other measures, the experiment included not making trash, not using any form of carbon-producing transportation, and not buying anything new.
This may sound like a lot of meaningless self-deprivation, but the question we wanted to answer was this: Does consuming fewer resources actually feel like deprivation, or is it possible that consuming less opens up another way of life that provides more enduring satisfaction? Or put another way, could we find a win-win way of life that might be happier both for us and for the planet?
Sometimes the answer was no. It may be better for the planet if we all decided not to buy big hunks of metal otherwise known as washing machines, but—believe me—washing my family’s clothes by hand did not make me happier.
On the other hand, eating local and riding bikes instead of driving cars allowed us to lose the spare tires around our guts, cure ourselves of longstanding skin problems and insomnia and become generally healthier. And not using electricity to power entertainment devices drew us closer together as a family and made us spend more time with friends.
Our experiences illustrated that some uses of planetary resources improve quality of life and some may not. Indeed, we could go a long way toward dealing with the crisis in our planetary habitat if we found a way to avoid those uses that don’t improve our lives—like the packaging that comprises 40 percent of trash in landfills, for example.
But as Christmas 2007 approached, the more pressing question for us was, did the season’s huge consumption of resources add to the Christmas experience or detract from it? Since one-sixth of all American retail sales (and as a consequence, a hefty proportion of our national planetary resource use) occurs during the holiday season, it’s a question worth asking.
Despite the fact that people spend relatively large portions of their income on gifts, as well as time shopping for and wrapping them, such behavior apparently contributes little to holiday joy.
I’ve already told you enough to let you guess how my little family’s experience played out, but you may be surprised to learn that our findings are backed up by bona fide psychological research: Even though oodles of presents at Christmas is the dominant American paradigm, it turns out that people who spend less and have less spent on them at Christmas actually enjoy the season more.
