I haven't yet started on my traditional Christmas season rant.. (it is only NOVEMBER after all, and I flatly refuse to think about Christmas until December.) Though with the shops starting to fill again with glittery red, green, gold and silver manufactured crap "Stuff", the hackles have been rising.. and frankly, the despair beginning to ooze into the very fibre of my being.

Soooo much waste. Sooo much junk. Sooo much money spent on stuff we throw away. Or just don't need. Rampant materialism gone mad.

Oh, I know for many, the decorations and stuff raise their spirits and make them happy. I envy you guys. It's so much harder being me at Christmas time. I simply can't get into it... and I'm getting worse. You'd think I might mellow with age, but I'm hardening up.

That said, I do treat it as a time to 'touch base' with friends... (More the end of a year than Christmas, to be perfectly honest. It just happens to coincide!) I have done the homemade card thing ever since Marc and I hitched our lives together to become our own little family unit. With the advent of email and then my ability to construct a webpage, it was a natural progression for the greenie within to transition from extreme paper wastage to an electronic transmission of our end of year greeting, in photo format. Just about always accompanied by a blurb, because nothing frustrates me more than getting a christmas card from someone I haven't managed to keep tabs on during the year AND THEY DON'T TELL ME WHAT THEY'VE BEEN UP TO!

I send out very limited christmas cards now; if you have email, then you aren't likely to get a card from me. And the card is usually just the photo - referring those who actually want to read 'a year in the lives of' to the webpage I do up. Even so... I sigh (and wish they had email!)

And... this is very very harsh.. but sending me a card with just a 'To' and a 'From'... is frankly, just a waste of money. And paper. Unless you are going to send me a newsy letter. (I'm not against snail mail itself, just *wasted* snail mail.)

So naturally I was very taken with Misc Mum's Christmas Card Challenge. I have been on her snail mail Christmas Card list in the past [She was a very organised card sender, and hers would usually be first to arrive, before December! and I was all NOOOOOOO! Not Christmas YET! What are you doing to me girl! ] and so I am extreeeeeemely chuffed that, instead, the sort of money she would have wasted on an ingrate like me is going to go to a far more worthy cause.
Presuming I would still have made her Christmas card list this year ;-) I can feel happy that a dollar or so is being given to charity instead of wasting it on me.

But that is just her money. And I am thinking Hmmmmm. How do I promote this? Sure, you should go on over to her blog, and be convinced, and then write your own blog post, and spread the word...

But also, I challenge you - and myself - to do something similar, and to donate the money you would have spent to buying something that is of fleeting use and enjoyment (and will end up in landfill) to something that really will make a difference.

So if you were going to send me card... don't! Donate something instead to Karen's fundraiser. (Send me an email instead, mind!)

And I am going to take a very deep breath, and tell my extended family to do the same, with what they would have spent on cards, and chocolates I don't even like. (Given my parents won't do any transactions online, I'm not quite sure how I'm going to go about this... perhaps simply ask them to donate to any charity instead...)

Come on. Let's make a difference.

Labels: Christmas