The Big Holiday Switch: Using Your Seasonal Dollars for Good

Over the last ten years, the average American adult has spent between $800-$1000 a year on end of year holiday shopping. In aggregate, America spends more than $150 billion a year on seasonal purchases. For the next couple months, this blog will be providing tips for how to leverage some of those dollars to create positive social impact. We're calling it the Big Holiday Switch.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about how the biggest theme coming out of this year's Pop!Tech was the notion that excessive consumption had put us in a dramatic tailspin towards personal and environmental disaster. In some ways, one could argue that the commercialization of the holidays are one of the clearest and most dramatic symptoms of that excess.

Yet at the same time, there is often something deeply sincere about the act of giving gifts, even if it is wrapped in the tinsel trappings of holiday half-off sales. There is something deeply humanizing about taking the time to think about what someone else likes and cares about and attempt to see the connections to your own interests. The act of giving can be an act of great joy, the ramifications of which extend far beyond the act.

What's more, holidays are a time for reinforcing the most important myths of goodness and redemption. The Christmas Carol is not just a new Jim Carrey movie, it's an incredibly important tail of our capacity for goodness. When we participate in the holiday right of passage - the parties, the cards, the decorations - we are often simply creating a social environment that makes the experience of the holiday lessons even more immersive.

Still, the holiday seasons are times of waste, and there is certainly a much greater opportunity to use our dollars for good.

Over the next six weeks or so, I'll be writing about a number of different ways to make this holiday season a more environmentally sustainable and socially impactful one. The topics will range from which online retailers to use to how to buy lower energy Christmas lights.

If you have ideas, please send me a message.