How much do you plan on buying – or have already bought – this holiday season? How important is it to that that you make the right purchases? What are your top priorities this time of year?
The holidays are for many people a time of year to indulge. And much of this indulgence comes in the form of excess buying: shopping for presents, getting new decorations, treating yourself to expensive foods, and possibly taking advantage of holiday discounts to buy a few things for yourself as well.
This creates an environment where overconsumption and consumerism are strong influences on people’s behaviours and ways of thinking. You can feel that if you aren’t buying a great deal, then you aren’t fully celebrating the holidays.
What you buy can easily become the most important part of the holiday, but that doesn’t make it more enjoyable. Excessive shopping can cause financial strain in addition to harming the environment with increased emissions and waste. But the costs of seasonal overconsumption and consumerism go beyond the price and production of what is bought; they can harm your mental health and prevent you from getting the most out of the holiday.
The things that tend to make people the happiest – in general and especially at this time of year – can’t be bought.
You have the best chance of giving yourself and the people you care about a holiday that’s full of meaning and memories if you choose to focus not on what you buy to celebrate, but on being thoughtful, thankful, and making connections with others.
This is much easier when you aim to avoid consumerism and overconsumption as much as possible.
What are overconsumption and consumerism?
When does consumption become excessive? What is the difference between holiday shopping and consumerism? Is if even possible to celebrate without overconsuming and/or being consumeristic?
The definition of overconsumption – excessive use or consumption of something – is largely self-explanatory, but distinguishing between overconsumption and regular holiday spending isn’t always so simple. This is a time of year where most people want more things in their lives and homes – exchanging gifts even if no one really needs anything, putting up decorations that would be considered clutter if they were out all year, and eating more than usual to celebrate.
At a time of year when spending is so prevalent, it’s natural that there will be emphasis on consumerism as well. Consumerism is the belief that the products and services you buy shape your identity and have the potential to make you a better person. This is an alluring concept: instead of having to invest the energy that’s required to build a distinct identity and discovering how you can express this, you can buy the associated items instead.
Consumerism and overconsumption are encouraged in the majority of holiday marketing – there are an enormous amount of must-have gifts and stores are full of seasonal items. The message that often accompanies these items is that the people who have them are festive, generous, thoughtful, sophisticated, outgoing, creative, etc. Shopping itself is even considered a way to celebrate.
Consumerism can be fun: seeing seasonal products for sale and finding ways to indulge yourself and the people you care about has the potential to be an enjoyable way to feel festive and generous. So what is wrong with this approach to the holidays?
Consumerism and overconsumption are often rewarding in the short-term, but they rarely provide lasting joy and are more likely to harm your mental health. High levels of consumerism often cause increased stress, depression and guilt.
People get used to new things very quickly, so it’s impossible to stay impressed with purchases long-term, leading to feeling unsatisfied again and buying more, which becomes a cycle. Those who buy beyond what they can afford have the added stressors of financial strain caused by their purchases.
Basing your holiday on things can leave you feeling hollow even before the season ends, wondering what all the stress and spending actually earned you.
This isn’t to suggest that all purchases are overconsumption and driven by consumerism. Shopping to get ready for your celebrations and giving and receiving gifts is often enjoyable. But these can be even more fun and rewarding if you’re intentional in what you buy to avoid overconsumption or consumerism.
But in the contemporary environment where ads are everywhere and overconsumption and consumerism are heavily encouraged, how can you avoid them and have a more meaningful and authentic holiday?
How can you celebrate without overconsumption?
Are the holidays inherently consumeristic? How can you celebrate without making a lot of purchases? What are the alternatives to overconsumption and consumerism?
Because of the nature of the holidays, and especially they’re commonly marketed, it can seem impossible to celebrate what’s become a corporate holiday designed to sell things in a way that’s free of consumerism. So many traditions can involve excessive amounts of stuff and, for many people, there’s a strong emphasis on the gifts they give and receive.
But you can avoid the consequences of overconsumption and consumerism through being intentional with what you buy, what you prioritise, and how you celebrate.
Some approaches you could adopt to do this include:
1) Notice when you’re being sold to
Even if you take in very little media, holiday marketing is unavoidable, and much of it uses scare-tactics to motivate you to spend, especially the fear of missing out, not doing enough, and failing to meet other’s expectations. The message that you need to give people gifts for them to love you is especially common in seasonal advertising.
Recognising fear-based ads for what they are can reduce their influence so you’re less likely to pay attention and instead be happy with what you have and confident that it’s enough. You probably don’t need more while deals last.
2) Focus on creating memories
The memories you create with friends and family have the potential to give you the greatest sense of joy and fulfillment from the holidays.
The nostalgia of the holidays is one of the best parts for many people. Building nostalgia requires repetition – watching the same movies, eating the same foods, playing the same games, and anything else your family likes doing. But overconsumption and consumerism can make building nostalgia difficult.
If consumerism plays a strong role in how you celebrate, you’re less likely to have strong nostalgia-inducing traditions since so much of consumerism is based on trends that change every year. Decorations are especially susceptible to trends that encourage you to update your décor each year. But if you replace your decorations based on annual trends, then there can’t be any nostalgia attached to them.
When spending time with the people you care about and making memories is more important than gifts, foods, and decorations, you’re likely to have a more meaningful holiday.
3) Practice authenticity
If you’re being influenced by overconsumption and consumerism, your celebrations can feel more performative than authentic.
Celebrating authentically means doing what you and your family enjoys, rather than celebrating how you think you ‘should’ and giving mainly ‘must have’ gifts.
This is often a rewarding way to celebrate because you’re choosing to recognise what you and your family believe is fun and important. Celebrating authentically also takes less energy than being performative because behaving in ways that are natural requires very little energy and can even leave you feel refreshed and energised.
When you identify your most important beliefs and values and consider how to honour them during a holiday that’s meant to represent connection, generosity, and gratitude, your celebrations can become deeply meaningful and anti-consumeristic. Consumerism is the opposite of these things – it’s isolating, self-centred even when it’s meant to be for others, and only offers short-term rewards.
By choosing to be authentic and thoughtful, your approach to the holidays can be even more meaningful because you’re focusing on what matters to you.
4) Aim to only make meaningful purchases
Few people would enjoy a holiday that’s entirely without purchases, and not all extra buying should be considered overconsumption. But you can have a fun and meaningful celebration if you try to make only meaningful purchases, especially gifts since this is where many people spend the most money.
A meaningful gift is one that ideally reflects someone’s personality, serves a purpose, and they can enjoy it long-term. Meaningful gifts are rarely the ones that are the most popular, which can make identifying them more challenging.
Some people, especially children and teens, will beg for new trending items. But there’s no guarantee these will bring them lasting joy after the trends shift, so these aren’t meaningful gifts, even if it’s what they say they want. Shopping for young people can be difficult because they’re still forming their sense of self, so getting them a gift that’s aligned with who they are when this isn’t fully formed yet is challenging.
With everything you have to do to prepare, taking extra time and consideration before buying things can seem like a taxing addition when you’re already feeling overwhelmed. But intentional buying can make you feel less obligated to know what is popular and meet expectations that aren’t your own so you can be authentic – which takes much less energy than being performative – and make the holiday centred on creating lasting memories.
5) Don’t compare yourself to others, especially online
While comparison can be healthy and motivating in certain contexts, measuring your celebrations against what the people you follow on social media are doing is unlikely to be either.
Comparison has the best chance of being positive when it’s between people who are similar, especially the amount of time and money they have to spend on the holidays. Basing whether you’re happy or not with your approach on how it compares to others’, especially influencers who make content for a living and likely receive free products, has a high chance of causing you to be disappointed.
When you compare yourself to what you see online, you can easily be made to feel that you aren’t doing enough and feel compelled to buy more to make your holiday more like theirs: having lots of new decorations, giving plenty of expensive gifts, wearing seasonal clothes, etc. But a great deal of what you see online is staged and the creators aren’t being authentic.
Finding motivation online can be highly useful, but you don’t need to have what you see online to have an enjoyable holiday.
6) Value things that can’t be bought
People get the most fulfillment from activities that produce novelty, excitement, a break in routine, self-expression, and approval from the people you care about. How you celebrate creates the potential to meet these needs to make this a very special time of year.
Marketing will offer ways to fulfil these needs, and there are products that can meet them, but typically you can feel the most fulfilled through spending your time in ways that require very few purchases. And during the holidays there are even more opportunities to have these types of experiences with your close friends and family as well as people you might not spend a great deal of time with throughout the year.
7) Practice gratitude
Overconsumption and consumerism only work if people believe they can never have enough, love has to be bought, and products are the solutions to their problems. These messages can feel inescapable during the holidays when so much marketing asserts that unless you buy what they’re selling, you’re going to disappoint the people you are about.
But if you believe that making the right purchases is what will allow you to feel happy and accomplished, the more you can expect to keep feeling that you have to buy something else. Marketing will always tell you that you need to have more so you’ll keep spending money searching for the product that will be the solution to your problems when this product almost certainly doesn’t exist.
The holidays can make these feelings even more prevalent because there are so many opportunities to feel that you still have something else to buy to make the holidays as enjoyable as possible.
One of the most powerful and wholesome ways of countering this consumeristic mindset is by practicing gratitude.
This is true all year but when visiting people you might not see very often and exchanging gifts, it can be even more relevant, meaningful, and effective at bringing your attention to what has the greatest potential to make you content long-term: strong healthy connections, ways of expressing who you authentically are, and building traditions you enjoy.
Practicing gratitude doesn’t require anything other than the opportunity to reflect on what you appreciate about your life. All you have to do is make the effort to notice what you’re glad to have and be grateful.
This is easier for people with healthy relationships, loving families, and enough money to treat themselves, but even those who have challenging lives can find reasons to be grateful. There are almost certainly at least some things in your life that bring you joy, and these can be even more meaningful if you take the time to recognise and appreciate them.
You can also use the things you wish you had to be grateful for to motivate yourself to bring them into your life – if you wish you had more friends to celebrate with, you can give yourself the resolution to meet more people.
Practicing gratitude is a very powerful custom that has the potential to improve your mental health and how you feel about your life while motivating you to find even more ways to be grateful. The holidays can be a good time to start the habit, and you can continue to practice gratitude all year.
.
Recognising that overconsumption and behaviours driven by consumerism aren’t rewarding and instead choosing to be grateful for what you do have can make the holidays far more meaningful.
Avoiding overconsumption and consumerism shouldn’t be thought of as something you have to do. If you tell yourself not to overconsume because it’s bad for the environment, you can’t afford it, or any other external reasons, it can become another way of celebrating inauthentically. But if you consider and recognise the ways that overconsuming and being consumeristic can prevent you from enjoying yourself, then rejecting consumerism and avoiding overconsumption can be an authentic and fulfilling way of celebrating.
What are the benefits?
Many people buy things – for themselves and others – because they think that their purchases can make them a better version of themselves. Buying lots of decorations can make you feel and look like you’re someone who values celebrating. Giving someone great gifts and/or spending a lot of money will show how much you love them.
But the most meaningful ways of feeling fulfilled – building traditions of connection and creating memories with others – are already more widespread during the holidays. This is a time of the year when you’re encouraged to go out of your way to do things that could otherwise be considered over the top, like spending time with others, finding ways to make get-togethers more special, and being happier and more outgoing. People feel free to be nicer to each other, give a stranger a compliment, smile more, and offer to help anyone who might need it.
If you recognise how much better this makes you feel, you can decide not to stop once the holidays end. You can continue being more generous with your time and attention all year because you appreciate how good it feels and while making life better for yourself and others.
And when you’re grateful for what you have, you’re less likely to think that you need to buy things to be happier.
You don’t need to buy the right decorations, get the perfect gifts, or try out new traditions you learn about online to make the holidays magical. Intentionality in what you do and what you buy is far more likely to make your holidays special and potentially lead to healthy habits that last beyond the new year.
This message of what the holidays can be gets lost in the consumerism or becomes suspicious when it’s being sold to you with a product, but you can choose to embrace this part while rejecting what corporations often turn it into.
If you would like to celebrate in a way that doesn’t involve overconsumption or consumerism, you can choose to make people, memories and gratitude the focus of how you celebrate. And you don’t need to stop when the holiday ends – you can keep doing this all year long.
