T'is holiday pickling season. Over the past two days my wife and I have produced

T'is holiday pickling season. Over the past two days my wife and I have produced a combined fifty-one jars of pickled carrots, beets, red onions, and baby dills, with bread and butter pickles left to do today. A few years ago we started to extricate ourselves from the bloated orgy of fiat consumerism that holiday gift giving has become, and have tried to steer things in a better direction. We give out these pickles and a few other little things that we produce by hand, and we try to minimize what we receive without being overly rude about it. It's been a slow change though, because people want to give you SOMETHING, but most of them don't have anything unique or personally made to give. And that's the problem: people just buy SOMETHING and give it to you, because that's the tradition. They feel that there must be an exchange of goods, but they (largely) don't have anything special to give. Thanks to Amazon and the general abundance and ease of aquiring physical goods in the modern age, there is little that you could buy for me that I couldn't just buy myself (unless you're uber-wealthy; reach out). And so we all just buy a bunch of shit and give it to each other except that, because we don't know each other's preferences as well as our own, it is a suboptimal process compared to just buying things for ourselves. A huge amount of money changes hands, a huge amount of goods changes hands, and we're all less satisfied at the end of it than if we'd just bought stuff for ourselves. I am trying, slowly, to return to the original spirit of holiday gift giving, when families would come together and share in the abundance of what they were most skilled at producing. I give you pickles because that's what I'm good at making. You give me some cheese because that's your specialty. My father crafts beautiful objects out of wood. Jerry down the street is a leather smith. Donna's farm will provide the turkey for the communal meal, Bert will bring his guitar, and Sheila will sing, and the house will be merry and warm. Many of these gifts are fleeting and will not leave this house, except in our minds and our bellies and that's fine; it's not meant to be an annual treasure haul. I present an idealized conception, far from my actual current reality (I have no personal farming capacity in my 10th floor city apartment, for example, so I bought these vegetables at a supermarket). But I paint this picture to gesture towards an ideal that I would like to orient myself to, in hopes that I might build a healthier and more fulfilling holiday season for myself and the people around me. I have been a sour Scrooge for too many Christmases now, but it need not be that way. The hollow consumerism that has come to dominate the season can be banished whenever we take action to make it so, and so I do. This is not to say that there is no place for the buying of gifts. Children, for example, do not earn paychecks and so there is plenty that you can buy for them that they cannot buy for themselves, and they will get great pleasure from the receipt of things that align with their interests. Likewise, if you are in a comfortable financial position there is much that you can give to the less fortunate among us that will materially improve their lives. In moderation, holiday gift giving can act as a small form of charity, without the associated shame on the part of the receiver. This holiday season, let us each do what we can to feed the machine of consumerism a little bit less, and nurture each other a little bit more.