'This year, I’m spending Christmas with a friend’s family in Italy 'When I told her about my no-presents philosophy, she was thrilled' 🎁 via ipaperviews
They begrudgingly followed my wishes, complaining the whole way, and then on the actual day, they sat down to watch me regret it all when we opened our presents under the tree. But to everyone’s surprise I didn’t feel any regret at all. Instead, I felt liberated.
I was so grateful to not have to receive more stuff that I didn’t need – or stuff I’d asked for but had to pretend I didn’t know they were buying me. While in turn, I got to know that I hadn’t wasted money buying them futile things – I’d made gestures to charities of their choice instead. It all made me feel so much lighter.
From there, my family slowly began to embrace the idea, and over the next few Christmasses, we started to reduce our gift giving to eventually just opting out. We realised that when we’d been buying each other presents, we’d really just been asking each other to buy things we could buy ourselves.
It means that now the only gift buying we do at Christmas is for ourselves – and often it’s weeks before or after the day itself. It becomes more about self-care as we treat ourselves to things we were going to buy anyway; things we actually need. We don’t bother with the stress of trying to buy presents for each other. And it turns out that when there’s no Christmas shopping to do, things are a lot less stressful.
This year, I’m spending Christmas with a friend’s family in Italy. When I told her about my no-presents philosophy, she was thrilled: “I would LOVE to not do presents with you.” She mentioned it to her family, and they were just as ready to adopt the tradition. None of us will exchange any presents at all, and instead of panic buying candles nobody needs, the only thing I’ll be bringing them is some “thank you for having me” wine.
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