Conscious care. Two words that are an antidote to festive overwhelm.

Reflections from Jo Kean, our Community & Partnerships coordinator.

Christmas. The time of year when the incitement to spend reaches its pinnacle. Newspapers fill pages with so-called advice on present buying, stocking fillers and last minute gift ideas, while social media pages and blogs offer a more personalised approach to this heady time, nevertheless ramping up the pressure. There are choices and options wherever we turn: endless lists of ‘must haves’ or ‘must dos’ without which our festive season will apparently be utterly unremarkable and instantly forgettable.

As a mum to a seven year old, giddy with excitement at the prospect of an advent calendar long before it arrives and already able to remember and feel delight at little family acts of festive celebration, I’d have to really harden my heart to fail to embrace his childish enthusiasm for Christmas and the anticipation of gifts sitting under the tree.  And yet, it’s nevertheless tempered by a strong refusal to succumb to the mass marketing and the siren call to buy, buy, buy.

Celebrating Christmas with a decorated tree in the house is also seemingly fraught with opportunities to get it wrong. While a plastic tree is reusable, it can’t be recycled and some argue that artificial trees have more than twice the carbon footprint of those that end up in landfill, and more than ten times the carbon footprint of those that are burnt, not to mention the energy intensive processes that brought them into being in the first place. So real pine or fir tree then? One that, as it has been growing, has naturally absorbed CO2 and released oxygen? Disposing of such a tree by composting produces CO2 and methane. Oh.

And yet, by visiting and supporting a local farm to buy a tree and sharing in the recommendation of a small family business, it feels the right thing to do for our nearby community. 2020 has been, we are constantly reminded, a year like no other for our high streets and businesses and showing our continued support for a local, seasonal business seems the right thing to do. Once on our compost heap, the decaying tree – although slow to rot - will become part of the wild and uncultivated area of the garden that encourages a plethora of minibeasts, and so feeds the wide range of wild bird species we are fortunate to welcome.

And so the tree is brought home and adorned with lights, trinkets and the odd kitsch decoration from a box full of ‘stuff’. The stuff we are being increasingly encouraged to do without. My son chooses a new decoration each year to add to the tree. And yet, this box is the ultimate tribute to recycling and re-use. Some of the decorations are over a decade old already, such is the sentimental attachment to them. Some have been re-fashioned out of bows and ribbons on previous gifts and, increasingly, we have turned away from plastic and towards more sustainable products in our choices.  

More than that, the box connects us to people we love. There are cards and labels in there from people no longer with us, kept for the simple joy they bring, the handwriting a profound and tangible evocation of a real and important person. We laugh at childish attempts at handwriting from years ago, and the comparison to the clearly formed letters on a page now is a source of wonder at the mysteries of transformation and growing up.

So, I choose to navigate these choppy waters of too much choice and too many options with a ThoughtBox mantra: ‘conscious care’. A gently alliterative phrase that invites reflection and personal connection to the decision-making process. I consider the options, the views, the opinions and slowly... carefully... consciously plot my course, calm in the knowledge that these choices have been made by me, for us but never without consideration of a wider world and a beautiful planet.