Christmas Present Buying
One of the things I wanted to blog about over Christmas was how I got on with trying to buy only Fairtrade and charity presents this year. It has taken me to get snowed in at my house to get round to writing about it! I woke up this morning to 15cm of snow and I haven’t attempted to drive my car today.
So back to the presents, I actually found it more difficult than I thought I would. One of the problems I encountered was a practical one, there are a limited number of high street shops I could go to so I had to look around to find the small number of fairtrade shops around. There are three I found in the whole of Belfast. The Oxfam Fairtrade shop on Rosemary Street, “Inspires” the fairtrade shop in the Spires shopping centre and “Pueblos” on the Ormeau Road. If you know others email them to me. This meant I was forced to buy lots of things on the internet. My last package came on the second last posting day before Christmas!
The other difficulty I found was not practical but I suppose a matter of conscience. There were some people who I couldn’t think of a fairtrade gift for but could think of a great present that wasn’t fairtrade or charity. The question was should I buy something fairtrade just for the sake of it, something they may not like or use or should I buy them something which I knew they would use and like which wasn’t fairtrade? I ended up doing the latter in a couple of cases because I figured buying presents for the sake of it was what I was trying to avoid doing.
I think it was quite a successful idea, I found that one of my fears that everything would be much more expensive was not true. It’s also a bonus to buy lots of things on the internet and in small shops because you don’t have to run the gauntlet of Christmas shoppers on the high street!
I heard of a couple of people making all their Christmas presents this year. I don’t think I’ll be progressing to that next year but my experiment did help me focus on what giving gifts at Christmas should be all about, remembering the poorest people (economically that is) in the world and giving them a bit of a boost and not the multimillion pound multinational chain stores. I’m sure that’s who Jesus would be giving gifts too at Christmas instead of buying the latest games console!
