‘Personal impact’ can be a problematic concept when it comes to consumption and marketing, for many reasons. Still, during the festive season more companies than at any other time of year come together, and concentrate their most emotionally loaded advertising efforts on individual consumers: you. Many of us already feel the pressure to come up with unique gift ideas year after year, let alone to do so ethically. Add in the expertly-crafted marketing drives and social pressure surrounding the festive season, and this time of year can become harrowing. This is exactly why it’s the perfect time to take a minute, slow down, and think about what’s really important: about why we give gifts, and if we do choose to give them how we can maximise their wider positive impact.
The first rule of being a mindful gift-giver is to try and ‘gift slowly’. What this means is really down to what is most important and what is sustainable for you. With our often hectic lives and an entire industry focused entirely on persuading us all to spend our money on this or that object right now, we can often forget that the idea behind gifting is mutual celebration. Think of gifting as a long-term process rather than a frantic, once-a-year checkbox. Keep a box with a list of gift ideas in it, and gifts you might come across as you go about your life the whole year round. The most classic and familiar form of ‘slow gifting’ is probably “gifting experiences” (from a homemade picnic to an all-expenses holiday away) or otherwise intangible gifts like the animal sponsorships offered by everyone from local cat rescues to the World Wildlife Fund, none of which generate waste the way the short-term gifting industry pushes us to. Meaningful time spent together is arguably one of the most valuable gifts of all in a world where we are all constantly looking for ways to save time and maximise efficiency.
And, of course, you can gift ethical products, ideally bought at a pace you can afford and consider properly throughout the year rather than in one mad rush. Often, slow gifting means aiming to give one really carefully chosen and invested-in gift rather than an assortment of throwaway tokens; but if you are someone who delights in compiling the perfect gift basket then collecting and curating ideas or products slowly can still elevate your gift-giving to a new level. ‘Ethical’ products might be secondhand, or from small local businesses, or of course made in fair working conditions for an ethical wage with 100% of profit going into charity initiatives around the world!
You can extend your new mindful gifting mentality to wrapping too. Think about reusing paper (or going old-school with newspaper) or sourcing recycled or otherwise more environmentally friendly paper ahead of time. You can buy or even, if you’re really organised with your time, make ‘seeded wrapping paper’, which the lucky recipient can bury in a pot or in their garden and grow. Scarves and drawstring fabric bags can double as a gift in their own right. We can’t not shout-out our leather ball’s packaging here, with our Alive and Kicking balls being sold in carrier bags upcycled from the woven sacking material our balls are shipped in: if you’re lucky, you’ll get one with a still-legible shipping stamp across it.
There are a lot of much larger decisions we all need to grapple with when it comes to minimising the negative impact of our choices and especially our consumption; but sometimes, it’s nice to think about giving somebody the perfect present. Small, mindful choices made at any or every level can accumulate into big change over time, so keep making changes to maximise your positive impact in ways that are sustainable for you. Part of this involves remembering to find the joy in these choices, so that continuously making them does not become a chore.
