This hol­i­day was pretty mel­low. Hav­ing spent too much time & money par­ty­ing all through Decem­ber, I was ready to lay low. That, and the fact that Christ­mas seemed to sud­denly appear out of nowhere.

My own fam­ily doesn’t really do much since my mom passed away a few years ago, other than one eating/cocktail/wee-cousins-getting-gifts gath­er­ing, usu­ally held at my sister’s place. That’s a nice get in/get out event: dress up, wrap gifts, drink, say hi to sib­lings I see once a year, eat bon bons, go home.

My husband’s fam­ily is another story. Christ­mas trees, bak­ing, orna­ments, sib­lings trav­el­ing from out of town, get­ting up at 7am to crowd around the tree, huge break­fast, more bak­ing, huge din­ner. Then there’s the whole gift thing. When I first mar­ried into this fam­ily, I was awed by the amount of gifts that were exchanged. My mother-in-law is an amaz­ing woman who loves to fill her already-packed day with buy­ing the right gifts for each of her four chil­dren and their respec­tive part­ners. I’ve always been amazed at how she found the time to do this. I can barely make it out to buy toothpaste.

I used to be a bit of a pack­rat, so accu­mu­lat­ing lots of great stuff over the hol­i­days was fab­u­lous. Over the years, how­ever, I real­ized I was accu­mu­lat­ing way too much of that stuff {insert George Car­lin joke here}, and I got tired of dust­ing and find­ing places to dis­play said stuff. Add the birth of a kid who does noth­ing but accu­mu­late stuff, and it wasn’t long before we showed up on an episode of Hoard­ers.

All that cou­pled with the idea that I was feel­ing pretty lucky with what I had in terms of fam­ily, and that not many are as for­tu­nate, I started ask­ing for less stuff. Or ask­ing for a dona­tion, like a goat, or microloan, or some­thing sim­i­lar. This thread of think­ing caught on with oth­ers in the fam­ily, and over the past few years, the giant pile of glossy gifts under the tree has dwin­dled. Less stuff to pack in the car, less stuff to find a place for, hap­pier recip­i­ents in a far off land. Huzzah.

A nice bonus to this Less Stuff deal was the intro­duc­tion of a Kris Kringle-type exchange among the sib­lings and their part­ners. Pick a name out of a hat and that’s the only gift you have to give. The kicker? It has to be handmade.

This was a very wel­come treat. It’s a chance to step away from the evil that is shop­ping, avoid­ing the whole wait-til-last-possible-minute-to-throw-money-at-a-gift-they’ll-never-use non­sense. And see­ing as most of us are in cre­ative indus­tries but spend too much time on our com­put­ers, it’s also a chance to get back to basics, to get our hands dirty again.

2009 was the sec­ond annual such exchange, and it turned out beau­ti­fully. Seems every­one had fun mak­ing their gifts, and all recip­i­ents seemed quite happy.

So instead of loathing every­thing about Christ­mas, due mostly to ram­pant com­mer­cial­ism and Stuff Accu­mu­la­tion, I’m now happy to be part of this annual fam­ily ‘art col­lec­tive’. Fun to both make and receive, it’s a great way to slow down and truly think about what you’re giv­ing. Time and thought are valu­able com­modi­ties that can­not be replaced.

orig­i­nal post on sjfbarnett’s blog about Cana­dian design, North­pub­lik