Shopping Outside the Box

It's almost time to celebrate the great American national holiday: the month-long festival of shopping. Huge sectors of the U.S. economy are entirely dependent on this season, in which people who really can't afford to are guilted into buying more toys for their children, and other people struggle to find gifts to buy for people who can afford anything they might want for themselves.

I'm not going to go as far as to boycott it all. Christmas means too much to my family, and they mean to much to me. But I do try to keep it in perspective and to keep from participating too heavily in the destructive aspects of it. For one thing, I don't go anywhere near the malls or the big box stores to shop. (Heck, I've never even set foot in a Target or Wal-Mart.)

I try to find gifts that don't involve spending money just for the sake of spending money... not because I'm cheap (though the fact that money's tight these days is a motivator) but because it's a more sane way of giving gifts. So I give people books I once bought for myself, or a piece of art I've created. Or I give them a free upgrade for their computer using some spare RAM or a mid-sized hard drive I don't need anymore.