I’m not buying friends and family Christmas presents this year, and you shouldn’t either

Picture the scene. It’s the office “Secret Santa”, an annual tradition beloved by precisely no one, but one that employees nevertheless feel compelled to participate in each December as if it were a contractual obligation. Workers sit around awkwardly opening presents and trying to guess which colleague is responsible for whatever useless “under a fiver” object lies within. A cheap candle; some unappealingly scented bubble bath; novelty socks; a regifted box of old Matchmakers chocolates; a set of plastic wind-up teeth related to a niche inside joke that was never all that funny to begin with; a “comedy” sex toy that makes everyone uncomfortable and gets flagged to HR. Present after present that nobody really needs or wants, hastily bought on lunch hours and stress-wrapped in work toilets. It prompts the question: what on earth’s it all for?

I’ve never really liked buying presents – not because I don’t love the people in my life, but because that love doesn’t easily translate into the purchase of physical objects. I’ve still always gone along with it in the past though: played the game of trying to think up genuinely thoughtful, or at least useful, things. Tracking them down online or spending some of the bleakest hours of my life in Westfield shopping centre. Battling swelling anxiety that I’ve woefully missed the mark. Spending joyless afternoons wrestling with ribbons and tags while making a pig’s ear of wrapping them (an activity I find about as unbearably tedious as ironing).

I’m sorry to sound like the Grinch, really I am, but nothing about the process has ever felt remotely enjoyable. And I’m not the only one to think so. New research by Oxford academics revealed that Christmas shopping can be more stressful than watching a horror film or sitting an exam; shoppers’ heart rates spiked by 44 per cent to 115 BPM due to the stress of looking for a Christmas turkey, for example.

But this year is going to be different. Because this year, I finally had an epiphany.

On a friend’s recommendation, I sat down to watch Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy, a Netflix documentary about overconsumption in the modern era. Ninety minutes later, I was pretty much radicalised into never wanting to buy anything again for the rest of my life.

The doc explores the chilling psychological tricks used by companies from Amazon to Apple to Adidas to induce us to buy more: constant “drops” of new designs, a tactic introduced by fast-fashion brands but now the norm across the industry; planned obsolescence built into every gadget and tech product, meaning consumers have no choice but to upgrade phones, laptops and headphones every few years.

AI visualisations, showing the grossly absurd volume of stuff constantly being produced, are shocking to see: 68,733 phones each hour; 2.5 million shoes each hour; 190,000 garments each minute. These things pour out of buildings and down steps, creating tsunamis that fill streets and accumulate into towering mountains of junk. The sequences show the physical reality of the situation we’re now in; the already huge number of objects being churned out is growing exponentially year on year. But where do all these things go?

We’re stuck on a planet with a finite amount of space, yet we keep filling every corner of it. Given that the majority of what’s produced, including our clothes, is made out of some form of plastic, it’s going to hang around for centuries to come. Even when it does break down, it releases microplastics, which wind up in our environment: our food, our drinking water, even our brains. Microplastics that are provably terrible for human health, and are even associated with the global birthrate decline (linked as they are to lower sperm counts).

There’s already TOO MUCH STUFF, for goodness’ sake! And Christmas merely ramps it all up to even more sickeningly dizzy heights, building into a crescendo of consumption that sees us spend vast amounts of money to prove we care about each other by swapping items we have no need for! Do I sound hysterical? That’s because I am!

The idea that Christmas has been co-opted by companies and transformed into a rampant commercial enterprise is hardly new, of course. I’ll save you the “real meaning of Christmas” spiel, which is better suited to being trotted out by a winsome, lisping American kid in a Christmas movie. But we’ve reached the point where it’s no longer merely cause for a cynical eye-roll. That’s why I’m opting out this year: I simply refuse to buy a single physical present.

Before anyone accuses me of Scrooge-like tendencies, I will still be giving my loved ones gifts – but they will be the gift of time spent together. Going for a glass of champagne or booking a Sunday roast; taking my family out to a show or my nieces for excursions (thereby also giving my sister and brother-in-law the priceless gift of an afternoon off parenting). It’s going to be 100 per cent experience, with no wrapping paper to be ripped and discarded, no unwanted tat to be binned or kept and resented.

Another friend is planning to make or bake all of her presents this year, partly to save money, mostly because she feels it will be more meaningful. Someone else I know is doing a second-hand Christmas, buying everything from charity shops (and a quarter of British adults have said they plan to pick up pre-loved gifts for their kids). For many years, my mum has donated to charities on behalf of our relatives instead of buying them presents. There are alternative ways we can be generous with our money and/or time – ways that don’t continue to put a strain on our overburdened Earth.

I know I probably sound at this stage like I’m wearing an all-hemp outfit and should by rights be living off-grid and growing my own courgettes. I’m most definitely not, and I’m most definitely not here to judge anyone else’s choices. But the last time I walked through the aforementioned dreaded Westfield, wading through crowds, overstimulated by the bright lights and constant clashing music and “beep” of card machines and panicked urgency of thousands of people feverishly spending more and more before it’s too late!, I realised something. We don’t actually need to do this. Not if we don’t want to. It’s up to us.

So, in the not-quite words of Mariah Carey, all I want for Christmas, is to never have to buy a single Christmas present – ever, ever again.