The ultimate Christmas gift? Buy nothing

Buy Nothing day is a protest against the environmental 'shopocalypse' that is the Christmas shopping rush
Reverend Billy Talen, guardian.co.uk 26 Nov 09;

Tomorrow is Buy Nothing day in the United States. A group of people including myself will preach and sing at the front door of Macy's department store in New York. We do this every year. We'll be there at 5am, when shoppers who have been up all night wait in line rush the glass doors. This is the human comedy at its most sad, and it is an environmental "shopocalypse".

Buy Nothing day is an old idea – that we should drop out of consumerism for 24 hours on Black Friday, the day when we are supposed to shop the most. The radical rechristening of the corporate Christmas took place back in the 90s, long before most of us equated consumerism with destruction of the Earth.

So kudos to the people at Adbusters for venturing forth with this. Nonetheless, Buy Nothing day is not enough, not for the emergency we face now. The American consumer's carbon footprint is exponentially the most sinful of all, 20 times the average. Even if everyone took the fast, throwing a bit of icy water on shoppers for a single day is not nearly enough.

The indigenous holy days that rise from the solstice – Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hannakah and all the rest – offer us an unseen opportunity. Solstice is the day when we get a few seconds more light and heat as the earth and sun roll back toward what will become the unleashing of life called spring. So the holidays in late December are the seed of change. It needn't be a consumer event.

This year we should radically redefine what our gifts will be, to simultaneously love our family and our earth. A gift from a big box store – from the demon monoculture – that puts us in a car for hours and is wrapped in plastic packaging, and was shipped a thousand miles with internal combustion engines– this year we won't consider that a gift at all. Such a gift hurts life on earth, and so it hurts us.

The language that sells us consumerism for Christmas is going in one direction and what we are quietly telling ourselves is the opposite. This year, after the banking failure and the debt mountains, the advertising has less power than ever. So find the things you have that may be under-used, over-looked. Shop locally and stay out of Tesco, Starbucks, Marks & Spencer and Primark.

There's no doubt Christmas is an annual environmental disaster. Last year Americans generated 25 million tons of trash between Buy Nothing day and Christmas. But we can still change it – and Buy Nothing day, amen, isn't a bad place to start.

• Reverend Billy is the head of The Church of Life After Shopping