A conscious Christmas: how to align your holiday traditions with your values

Let us start by saying no: we’re not asking you to buy Impact Berry coffee for Christmas.

We think it might be better to take a step back from the usual routine of spending for the sake of spending, and instead, create new traditions that actually align with our own values. 

Christmas has become a retail festival where the tradition is often about buying things we don’t use, with money we don’t have, causing stress we don’t need. It’s estimated that the USA spends an extra US$1 trillion in this season alone. The UK uses 227,000 miles of wrapping paper and a billion cards (33 million trees). In the EU, an estimated 80 million tonnes of food is wasted every year. And it is estimated that the typical 3 days of festivities could result in as much as 650kg of CO2 emissions per person.

Just think about all the packages being flown around the world for this one festival. All the trucks, all the fuel. All the packaging, all the plastic. Did you know that Amazon releases the same quantity of carbon dioxide as 13 coal-burning power plants produce in a year? And that amount is increasing every year? 

We’re not saying you shouldn’t celebrate the holidays. We’re saying you can design ways of celebrating that align with your values and maybe even give the planet a break!

It’s very important to have traditions that are meaningful to us. But instead of following the traditions that society gives us, why not create our own?

Wouldn’t it be cool if, instead of buying more stuff, the mainstream tradition was to donate to people who don’t have enough?

What if we celebrated our favourite objects by repairing them instead of replacing them?

What if, every year, hundreds of families around the world had the tradition of going out and planting trees together?

All we’re saying is, you are allowed to choose your own traditions! 

We could change what is currently a festival of consumption and waste, into something completely different, with new traditions that give back to the planet. We could transform planet care from a chore to a celebration the whole family partakes in and creates loving memories from every year.

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa, Dongzhi Festival or others, you can easily adapt time-honoured traditions to make more sense to your personal values, and to the current state of the planet.

So this December, we ask you: what traditions do you want to create and pass on to the generations to come?

What do you want to normalise?

What do you want to change?

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This is written by Mel, an amazing person, who accompanied Timo and me from almost the very beginning of when Impact Berry was created.