November
2006
It’s Almost Thanksgiving…Time for Alternative Christmas!
You can tell it’s Thanksgiving, because the stores are playing Christmas carols…ever think that maybe Christmas, like life in general, should be about something besides shopping and credit card debt?
Buying Christmas presents is a great tradition, but it can be much more meaningful and connected to the real spirit of Christmas than a trip to Wal Mart. We’re developing a list of alternative gift ideas — Alternative Christmas Markets, where you can choose gifts of service, or buy crafts from individual vendors or fair-trade organizations; Alternative Stores, like Ten Thousand Villages or A Road Less Traveled, which focus on fair trade and environmentally sustainable consumer goods; Alternative Gifts, like donations to particular charities; Just Really Alternative, like the famous but elusive traveling Anti-Mall. Got ideas? Send them to — we’re hoping to have a full list by late November!
Our thoughts about creating an Alternative Christmas come out of the realization that we weren’t born to shop. Since 2000, a growing cadre of activists has memorialized this fact with the annual Buy Nothing Day, 24 hours in which we consciously commit to Not Shopping and/or taking part in anti-consumerist or alternative consumer activities. In America and Canada, Buy Nothing Day is the Friday after Thanksgiving — also known as Black Friday, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year, the day which puts retailers in the black (although it has a different meaning to exhausted and overworked hourly retail staff).
What might you do with the time and energy that you would spend shopping? Maybe just spend time with your family; cook or exercise or read or write or paint or travel…or do something really radical to disrupt the shopping culture, like the folks from adbusters. If you take part in Buy Nothing Day, we’d love to hear what the experience was like for you. Email us at and tell us about it!
And to learn more about the theological basis for a Christian response to our culture’s materialism, check out PCU’s position paper, Christianity and Consumerism. All of our position papers are available online!