When you think of Christmas, you think of big presents, dancing lights in the streets, enormous Christmas trees, mistletoes (and kisses, of course!), milk and cookies, Santa Claus, candy canes, exchange gifts, scrumptious dinners, outrageous year-end parties, and basically everything else that’s fun! Seriously, if I were to list them all, I’d run out of paper to write on!
Christmas is fun. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s practically why it’s dubbed as the “most wonderful time of the year.” However, in recent years, Christmas is viewed a little bit differently – a little less fun, to be exact. And it’s all because of Festive Waste.
What Do We Mean When We Say Festive Waste, Exactly?
Festive waste is the umbrella term for all the waste products created during Christmas season – or any big celebrations, for that matter. Every year, we celebrate a several big events that inflict considerable impact to our environment. We have Easter, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July or Independence, and then there’s the biggest threat of all – Christmas.
Compared to the aforementioned holidays, Christmas is a pretty big and lengthy celebration. It’s generally stretched over the entire month of December – with most of the festivities culminating on Christmas Day, December 25th. After Christmas, year-end celebrations also take place so that practically makes the month of December the month of bombardment of events.
Children look forward to this season. Besides the reality of cursed cold weather, there are many other things to look forward to like presents, for example. Exchanging presents during Christmas day is one of the most popular and lasting Christmas traditions of all time – and kids love it! But according to Serenata, in the UK alone, we accumulate 227,000 miles of gift wrapping paper waste annually. Imagine how many trees were cut to make all of that – or worse, how much laminated plastic material will it add to our already polluted lands?
You see, behind the façade of being a merry and happy season hides a pretty harsh truth. Worst of all, most of us have never even considered it! We are too busy celebrating, too preoccupied with Christmas preparations, that we’re already too tired to consider the consequences.
Christmas is supposed to be fun; it’s supposed to be wonderful. But if things continue as they are, we might not even have a Christmas in the future. Yes, it’s once a year. Yes, it’s just one day. But this one day produces waste equivalent to a hundred days! We’re already wasteful as things stand and Christmas is giving us the pass to be even more wasteful than we already are.
This brief article is not meant to dissuade you from celebrating Christmas this year. It’s meant to challenge you to look for better and more meaningful ways to celebrate.
Think. Think as long and as hard as you can. How can you celebrate Christmas without being counterproductive? How can you keep the fun and lessen the wastage at the same time? If you find your answer, preach it.
