Life Kit - How to shop for sustainable holiday gifts

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

Shopping secondhand can ease the environmental burden of holiday consumption — and save you money, too. Here are three tips to help you start cutting down this season.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hearing really good advice at the right moment is powerful. Suddenly, you've got the energy, clarity, and momentum to take on a challenge. Each week, LifeKit gives listeners insight into the world around them. Your contributions to NPR stations make this important public service happen. At LifeKit, we're dedicated to helping people not just manage their lives, but enrich their lives. Thank you. your support will help keep the good advice coming. Go to donate.npr.org slash life kit to get started with your donation. Again, that's donate.npr.org slash life kit. And thanks. This is NPR's Life Kit.

I'm Mary Louise Kelly. The U.S. economy wants you to buy, especially this time of year. This Cyber Monday is your last chance to score big online. Fragrances so fancy, eyeshadows they'll adore. All the brands they want, all the savings you love. Save on a gift that says it all. This year, the holiday shopping push comes as inflation is rising, so things cost more. And as supply chain disruptions are making it harder for Americans to get what

they want, buying new impacts our ever-changing climate. The choices we make on how we shop and what we shop for can help protect the environment. And handmade or secondhand gifts can be just as special, if not more. So on this episode of Life Kit, how to shop less for the holidays and give meaningful gifts without buying new. We'll hear from journalist Annalise Griffin, who wrote about her deliberate choice not to buy anything new this season. Hi there. Hello, thank you for having me. So what are the parameters on this promise? Are you really not going to buy anything new for the holidays? No, that's not quite true.

I always buy my chocolate new, and there needs to be plenty of that. That doesn't tend to weather the year that well. No, it doesn't. And I did buy my daughter a hoodie that is lined with fluffy fleece because it was a very specific request and it is something that she needs and we do live in Vermont. And I looked in three used places and couldn't find one. So Land's End Kids got my money. Walk me through how and why you first started on this promise not to buy new stuff for the holidays. My husband and I got tired of picking

an item off of a list for each other, wrapping it up and putting it under the tree as though it was a surprise. Yeah. It just felt really unsatisfying. And we live in a town where we have a wonderful thrift shop that we both go to once, sometimes twice a week. So we decided that we would just keep an eye out for something that spoke to us about the other person and buy that as a gift. Because we're adults, we buy the things we want for ourselves, but to not have that sort of element of surprise and delight just felt like it was counter to the whole point of getting gifts. And it's expanded from there because we have a great infrastructure for secondhand things. And, you know, there's a budget component to it, of course, but it embraces the

kind of abundance that's around us. There's so much stuff. And if you just connect to other people, and there are many ways to do that in my community, there's buy nothing groups, there's a parents community closet where you can go and, you know, shop for free. And there's also secondhand stores galore. Well, and it's so interesting. You're talking about this as satisfying as a pleasure, that it takes more work, but it also sounds like it's, it's been liberating. Yeah, and that's on a couple of different levels for us. When you have small kids, your house fills up with their junk. And so finding a place for it to go without feeling like we are just cycling through this mountain of stuff that goes along with being a parent of small children

in the US has really made me aware of stuff. And being able to recycle it back into my community and then to get things for free from my community has been very liberating. But also in our household, it's allowed us to work less because we spend less. We don't have a ton of stuff. We don't buy everything new. So it sounds, just to buy fewer things, how to have fewer things around you. But I'm not a minimalist. You know, I don't think that chipping away at consumerism and trying to reduce it has to be at odds

with your aesthetic or with the idea of beauty and surrounding yourselves with joy. So there's that part of it. And I do struggle with that a little bit because I shop at the thrift store a lot and new things come into our house pretty frequently. So let me let you respond to the pushback that I would get if I launched this program in my house. You mentioned you have kids. I have kids. My kids have always got their eye on the new hip shiny thing that all their friends are asking for. How do your kids respond to secondhand gifts? I mean, for now, it's what they've grown up with. And so they accept it. But I will also say that my kids, one will be four on Friday, and the other is six. And we have Netflix, they don't see the same kind of commercials that I saw growing up. But I suspect that that's coming.

I suspect that we are going to have to start having conversations about that. Yeah. So a watch and wait on the kids front. What about just the time factor? One of the tempting things about just pulling up a website and clicking buy is that it's fast for people who don't have time to do all the lovely, homemade, thoughtful things you're describing, is there some kind of middle path? Yeah, I hear that so much. And, you know, thrift stores are not as good in cities. You know, they're more expensive. They're fewer and further between. Their selection is picked over.

I totally understand that. And time is something for everyone. I mean, it's something for me too. I would say there are online ways. I find a million great things on Poshmark. There is some vintage stuff. eBay is a great resource. A really good resource for vintage things is buygoodwill.com. It's sort of like where Goodwill and eBay meet. They often have like really good vintage toys. So if you have, you know, a relative or a friend who now has kids and you played with some sort of classic toy in the 80s or 90s together, you can find it on there, which to me is like a very thoughtful gift. I think that buying art everywhere has local artisans, you know, like

art and craft markets for the holidays. I think those are all sort of both keeping your money in your community with real people. And with the idea that supply chain is a problem, those things are here right now. You don't have to wait for shipping. With your journalist hat on, I mean, you've reported this issue out. What did you find about the pressure that so many of us feel to buy more and particularly to buy more this time of year? I mean, there's a very real component to which our consumerism keeps the economy moving forward. Yeah, this has come up over and over again in the discussions we've had this week that

the American economy, 70% of the GDP is based on consumption. You know, we need to buy more. There are negative consequences for the economy. I mean, I think that one thing that we, is just part of the American psyche is this very all or nothing perspective where we're always like all the way in or all the way out. Just doing this a little bit, like look for a place where you can see that you're overspending or overexerting yourself and try to not just think about it from this, oh, I owe the planet this, or I need to reduce my consumerism because of this sort of abstract idea of social responsibility and make it something that actually works better for you too.

I'm also thinking about all the catalogs that come through the door this time of year. I find if I open them, I find a million things that I definitely need and must go buy right away. But if I just don't open them, it's a lot easier. Yes, the same. I do the same thing because I am not some kind of anti-consumer martyr. I also enjoy buying things and I enjoy looking at catalogs. Looking at the Sears and the JCPenney Christmas catalog, that thing that was as thick as a brick and huge when I was a kid was like something that I enjoyed. And so now when I get the catalogs, I throw them away immediately. I, every couple of weeks I look at my phone and I look at all of the apps that are designed

expressly to get me to buy things and I dump them in the trash and then I slowly load them back on. But I also have made a promise to myself that I don't buy things after 8 p.m. or before 8 a.m. I am just so susceptible. Like my ability to make choices at that point of the day, it's just, it's done. Some tips and some lived experience there in how we might maybe curb our spending a little bit this holiday season. Journalist Annalise Griffin, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. A version of this episode originally aired on NPR's All Things Considered, produced by Elena Burnett and edited by Courtney Dorning. For more Life Kit, check out other episodes. We've got one on navigating holiday anxieties and another on

gift giving. You can find those at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love life kit and want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life kit newsletter. If you've got a good tip, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823. That's 202-216-9823. Or you can email us a voice memo at lifekit at npr.org. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Janet Ujung Lee. Megan Cain is our managing producer. Beth Donovan is the senior editor. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, and Sylvie Douglas. Our digital editor is Beck Harlan. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Thanks for listening.