I usually enjoy a good old-fashioned consumer-centric holiday. The energy in a crowded mall the week before Christmas is an entertaining blend of ecstasy and desperation, although the parking (or lack thereof) severely tests my patience and, on one occasion, drove me to eject my own mother from the car. She was yelling from the back seat to reverse into a newly empty space, even as several other cars were homing in on the spot from behind and sated shopping carts were passing perilously close to the front of my car. I suggested that it might be a good idea to get out of the car and leave the parking to me so that she and my wife could get a head start on the shopping. I still think it was a good call. Some holiday family time is better spent apart. Once the car was parked, the materialistic shopping spree began in earnest. And it was fun.
So this year I was surprised to look around our living room a few days before Christmas and see no tree, no lights, and no gift-wrapped presents. My wife had just finished arranging a few favorite Christmas tchotchkes around the room. Beautifully, as usual. She is a curator, after all. Christmas carols were playing. I was feeling that familiar Christmas glow, even without the tree, the lights, and the gifts. Could this be what minimalists are talking about when they say that the stuff isn't what matters? It was worth looking in to.
Mele Kalikimaka
Someone recently asked me how people in Hawaii know that it is Christmas. A reasonable question. The weather doesn't change (much), although the warm sunny days are slightly shorter and we get a bit more rain. The most reliable indicators are the holiday lights twinkling on the new condominiums around downtown. They light up in mid-November. Around the same time we start to see cars ferrying imported pine trees from the container ships to their living rooms. Having grown up in Montana, where pine trees actually grow in the ground, these trees are sad beyond belief. Sometimes they bring uninvited mainland visitors, like the slug infestation of a few years ago.
We opted for a fake tree. If it is good enough for Martha Stewart to sell in Home Depot, it's good enough for me. Our tree even had fake red berries and built-in lights, which saves hours stringing them. It was perfect. Until the lights started to burn out. And the berries fell off. And the box for storing the tree rotted out. We kicked it to the curb (for bulk trash to pick up) last year.
The plan was to buy a new one this year. On our first attempt to find a new fake tree, the model we wanted was sold out at Home Depot. But the salespeople assured us that another shipment was coming in next week. They even took our name and number and offered to call us when it arrived. Yeah, right. Never happened. I called back a few times and the fake tree shipment never arrived.
No worries! We have Amazon Prime! And Amazon sells everything, including trees. The only problem is that they don't ship fake Christmas trees to Honolulu. I don't know why, but this is a fairly common problem in Hawaii. A bit of internet sleuthing turned up a vendor that would ship us a tree, as long as we bought a $2000 fake tree. Ummm...no.
We gave up. Neither of us had the time or inclination to put any more effort into finding a fake tree. It was actually a relief. I kind of miss putting up the tree, but I am quite content knowing I won't have to take one down in a couple weeks.
Merry Christmas from the family
The gifts disappeared more gradually. Partly, it was the ravages of time. In the last fourteen months, my mother, my dog, and my stepmother all died of cancer. That's a big chunk of family to lose in a short time and also a big part of the annual gift exchange. It's a cliche, but I appreciate the value of people over things in a way I hadn't before. Maybe it was their last gift to me.
On a happier note, our refrigerator died, too. Not all of it, just the plumbing. Every time we got a glass of water, the wiring in the fridge got a soaking from a fractured plastic pipe. After shorting out the electrical, the water leaked into our basement bedroom. Not a good situation. Instead of separate gifts and stockings full of socks and shampoo, my wife and I decided to splurge on a snazzy new refrigerator for Christmas.
Pretty cool, isn't it? Definitely the right choice, but a refrigerator is a bit large to put under the fake tree we don't have. And it won't arrive until late January.
In past years, we could count on getting a few gifts from other relatives, but more and more of those have been replaced with gift cards. Nothing wrong with that. I love to receive gift cards, particularly if they are from Whole Foods, and sending Amazon gift cards is better that sending socks to our nieces and nephews. But they don't look terribly impressive piled up on Christmas morning. All tolled, we bought, wrapped, and mailed exactly zero gifts this year. And we received one gift wrapped box.
Throw and Go Holiday Season
Minimalists feel that time is more precious that possessions, and that time and things compete with each other. The logic is sound. Buying a thing consumes time, maintaining the thing consumes time, and eventually disposing of the thing consumes time. Earning the money to pay for the thing consumes time and, for people who don't have the skills to maintain the thing, hiring someone else to maintain the thing consumes more time and money, as well as the time needed to earn the money to pay for the person to fix the thing. Buying less should free up time for other pursuits.
This proved to be true during our (accidentally) minimalist holiday season. In past Christmases, large parts of our weekends were devoted to pulling the fake tree out of storage in the basement and then setting up, decorating, un-decorating, taking down, and putting the fake tree back into storage. Not this year. I also spent much less time in traffic hell trying to get to the mall parking lot, circling the parking lot looking for a parking place, and wandering the mall (or scouring Amazon) looking for gifts.
Although the gift count was low, the party count was high. It was a throw-and-go season: throw parties, go to parties. Repeat as necessary. An intimate Thanksgiving dinner with a couple of friends, an office party in Austin, a big blow out thrown by a realtor-friend for her clients (most of whom are also long-time friends), a sing-along Christmas carol party with members of the Honolulu Opera Theater (yes, I kept my karaoke-honed voice in the background), and Christmas dinner in our home with friends and visiting relatives.
We didn't throw-and-go to these parties because we didn't have a tree or many gifts. We would have gone to those parties anyway. But I enjoyed them more than usual, which seems to be a direct result of reducing the time consumed by obligatory gift giving. As a minimalist would say, there was more of me left to give.
Even our big purchase of the season, the fridge, became a completely different gift-giving experience. My wife and I spent hours and hours researching different styles and models of refrigerator. We reviewed our household budget to decide what we could afford. We visited (and revisited) appliance stores. We opened hundreds of refrigerator doors. We discussed the relative merits of different drawer configurations (and wine racks). We talked to several sales people. We read Consumer Reports. And eventually we settled on the perfect new fridge. Most importantly, we did it together. In past years, that time was spent alone. And that made all the difference.
What about next year? Minimalist or consumer? Personally, I'm leaning minimal on this one. There are too many great people to share the holidays and too little time. Spending that time in traffic and shopping to find them all gifts to express my gratitude for their love and friendship seems to be beside the point. Better to go straight to the heart of the holidays and skip the detours.
Accurate. Love you.
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