Christmas fun and footprint

Christmas is a difficult time for those interested in a more sustainable lifestyle. As a festival it has a cultural richness and international diversity which is precious and worth preserving. In Northern countries it provides some cheer in the middle of the winter without which it could feel like very long and depressing wait for Spring (something the pre-Christian Pagans understood long before Christmas was invented!). It also provides a moment when there is a pause in the 24/7 world of work and business (at least for most of us), politics takes a break, and there is a time to focus on more important things like family and particularly on children.

The difficulties come with some of the downsides of Christmas where in many countries an originally religious festival has become largely overwhelmed by an orgy of material over-consumption and over-indulgence in food and drink (requiring even more consumption in the New Year with gym membership and equipment purchases to support that resolution to get back into shape). However, if you try suggesting having a more frugal Christmas in which we purchase and consume a little less, any non-green thinking family and friends will start referring to you as ‘The Grinch’ or worse. You can suggest a gift-giving amnesty amongst adult family members, but someone is bound to break the amnesty leading to panic buying of New Year presents to compensate.

The real problem with a sustainability marketing take on Christmas is that it is like watching a DVD of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in reverse. Ebenezer Scrooge is a man who loves and celebrates Christmas thoroughly, gives gifts liberally and ensures there’s a feast for all his friends and family. He’s then visited by nightmarish visions of Christmas present in which a relatively small proportion of the world’s consumers enjoy a lavish Christmas amidst expanding global poverty, and visions of future Christmas’s blighted by the consequences of climate change and global economic collapse brought about by our unsustainable past. Little wonder he ends the story tucked up quietly at home saving both energy and money by opting out of Christmas as a consumer festival.

So how to spread sustainable joy at Christmas, can be a real challenge for the sustainability enthusiast. We clearly aren’t the only people to worry about this issue – if you search Google for ‘Sustainable Christmas Ideas’ you get 1.2 million results. Many of these reference Bill McKinnon’s book ‘Hundred Dollar Holiday’ which aimed to let the American consumer have a fun Christmas without breaking the bank. Much of this involves a return to more traditional Christmas gifts and an emphasis on making rather than buying. In a post-Credit Crunch winter it may also become a guide to necessity rather than choices for many families. For the more hardcore sustainable lifestyle enthusiasts there is even the ‘Buy-nothing-Christmas’ movement which seeks to reinstate Christmas as a festival of doing and making rather than of purchasing.

So what are the top tips for a more sustainable Christmas season ? Beyond the obvious suggestion of choosing the types of ethical and sustainable products featured in the book, we’d suggest the following:

1. Regifting – give someone a serviceable item you own but don’t need anymore, that they might enjoy. CDs are an obvious candidate for regifting – just make sure you don’t give it back to the person who gave it to you last year (and of course Ebay represents regifting opportunities on a grander, more commercial scale);
2. Re-using – some products can have a second life as Christmas gifts. An odd assortment of once fashionable or functional clothes plus a battered old suitcase or trunk can become a magical dressing-up box for younger children;
3. Making – if you’re creative you can make, bake, sew or knit presents according to your talents. If you’re planning to give things like paintings as presents though, we would recommend getting you talent verified by a third party. Your Mother telling you that you paint beautifully doesn’t really count;
4. Give time not money – making involves giving a tangible product with your time embedded in it (rather than your cash), this is a concept you can extend by giving a loved one a voucher for your time. It could involve child minding for friends with young children, cooking a special meal for the family gourmet, computer troubleshooting for the technically challenged, or a voucher for a relaxing massage for your nearest and dearest. Just try not to mix them up.
5. Worthy cause gifts – if you feel there is expectation from family and friends that you spend money on them, an alternative is a charity gift of the sort that Oxfam have developed successfully. This can be tricky to use with younger family members. If you tell them ‘I bought you a goat for Christmas’ they will expect to find one under the tree struggling to get out of the wrapping paper, not several thousand miles away helping an African village.
6. Ask people what they want first – OK, you lose the element of surprise, but you also avoid getting back the present you give someone, a year later and the embarrassment of a regifting disaster.

Perhaps the best way to achieve a more sustainable Christmas is to take a ‘value added’ approach and think about how much fun any given component contributes compared to its environmental cost. In classic marketing strategy style, this conjures up a 2x2 matrix into which all of Christmas can be almost magically accommodated.


Show this to any family member who has attended a Business School or done any work with management consultants (or possibly ever been brainwashed by a religious cult) and they will instantly understand what you’re trying to achieve in devising strategies for a more sustainable Christmas. Some elements of Christmas may be difficult to locate in the matrix (like flying reindeer or drinks made involving advocat) but you can at least have fun coming up with ideas to move activities between boxes and to reduce the ecological footprint of Christmas, not the amount of fun to be had.

In the meantime, we wishing you a happy and relatively sustainable Christmas, and best wishes for a peaceful and rewarding 2010.

Frank and Ken.