why i hate december

If my #3 ds wasn’t coming home for the holidays I would happily skip right to january.  I absolutely hate the whole hoiiday and gift giving song and dance.  The problem is that I care very much about where things are made, what they are made out of, who made them and so on.  I also don’t really like the idea of paying a small fortune for supposedly green versions of things.  That makes things like mainstream chocolate or candy or books things I try not to buy. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love getting and giving gifts.  It’s just that this is very difficult for me.  I have a large family and 2 of my 5 kids currently have partners who need gifts too.  My brother is married to a great woman who doesn’t mind that i don’t send her a gift and she doesn’t send me one either.  My brother and I have a great understanding of sending yummy food to each other as a group present for each family and that works fabulously.  His birthday is in may and I already have a gift selected for him.

Likewise I we send food to my dh’s brother and his wife, and they send us gift cards, easy and easily done.

But that leaves the rest of my family.  My parents not only want me to give them ideas for me and the kids, well they basically don’t buy gifts for the kids anymore except for birthdays.  I should add they are helping with ds#3’s airplane ticket.

So I get stuck planning all the gifts, getting things I don’t want and wouldn’t have bought for the reasons above, looking ungrateful and scroogelike at the same time.  This leaves me pulled in too many directions and feeling too that almost no one in my family actually LISTENS to me at all.  My concerns about consumer goods and the environmental and human impact of them isn’t just some speech I am spouting, I really truly and deeply care a lot.

I just don’t feel that gift buying should mean that I have to put aside what is important to me all the rest of the year.  My consumer dollars are one way that I can vote with my feet.  I do buy online and I do make donations in people’s names etc.  but it is still really stressful.

I don’t have the time or energy to make homemade presents for everybody.  I made over a dozen batches of my famous spicy nuts last year though.

I have a miserable cold and cough just now too and my 2 teens fight almost constantly when the 2 of them are home and that is just plain exhausting on top of parenting my dd on a daily basis.  The dog decided today was the day to start digging holes again and escaping from the backyard too.

Well, now that i have gotten that off my chest, I’ll go back to trying to find gifts that are acceptable for me and for the recipients.  I found a really cute pattern for knitting a daschund on etsy today:)  My dd is crazy about weiner dogs.