I still really, really don't like shopping
With a new foreword
Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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At around this point every year as we fast approach silly season, I raise my gaze and palms to the sky and give renewed thanks that I’m just not that into Christmas.
One winter several years ago when I still ‘did’ Christmas, around the date of the winter solstice and just like its solar noon, my gift-giving anxiety reached its apex.
With the looming expectation of having to source multiple thoughtful and individual gifts that wouldn’t end up on eBay within days, alongside the fact my entire family also have their birthdays from November to January, my nerves were at breaking point.
It was at this moment I realised I had little choice but to take the plunge and suggest to my family something I had toyed with — or more accurately, fantasised about — for years.
But what I had in mind seemed improbable. It would be seen by many as sacrilegious. We’d be breaking an internationally recognised unwritten law. It probably was an actual criminal offense, somewhere.
I gathered my kin and put forward my radical idea.
How about we just … don’t buy any gifts.
Why don’t we just forget the gifts entirely.
Let’s all just stop shopping, I whispered.
To my surprise and within mere moments, everyone involved gleefully accepted with not a shred of resistance or a backward glance.
It turns out each person had been secretly hoping we’d all eventually come to our senses and someone would put an end to the absurd pantomime that is Christmas gift buying.
It turns out, opting out was an option all along.
I’ve just returned from a week in the Portuguese countryside where I’ve been wafting around sun-drenched vineyards in sleeveless tops and knee deep in cheese.
Touching down in freezing London has pulled me back into my reality that is the hamster wheel of consumerism with a vicious jolt.
Queuing up at immigration, I wondered if while I was away I had managed to evade Black Friday. Not so lucky. Google told me it was still to come, officially marked the day after Thanksgiving.
urgh.
And so I felt a pressing need to resurface a piece I wrote on A Day Well Spent, right back in its infancy. It was the second column I ever wrote here, published in the same week this newsletter first went live, back in June 2023.
Which means, hardly anyone has read it.
It’s called Why I really, really don’t like shopping.
Note: Please accept my apologies for using the C-word in November. I will endeavour to keep this newsletter a seasonal content-free zone and I'll probably mention the C-word just once more this year, if that.
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