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Keeping current in wellness, in and out of the water
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Season of the Witch
August 26, 2014
— 1 Comment
When September sends kids back to school everyone starts to prepare for winter holidays. I was at the grocery store yesterday and saw the entire seasonal section ready for Halloween. It is still August but the candy, the costumes, and all the yard decorations are on display to get us in the mood. Americans spend about 7 billion dollars annually on Halloween, according to the National Retail Federation. More money is spent on adult consumes than on children’s costumes. The season that begins Nov 1 and runs through Dec 16, known as the holiday shopping season results in 52 billion dollars in spending. You might say that the slow warm up in both celebration time and money spent on Halloween is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the spending year. People get very wound up with lists and crafts and party planners as New Years finally approaches. The typical diet/fitness regime begins on January 1, along with new credit card redemption plans. The remorse about over spending and over eating lasts about a month until Super Bowl time.
Fall is a natural time to store things and preserve them for winter. Our ancestors endured heavy hardship if they did not prepare and store enough food for the winter months. Harvest was a time of joy and celebration (perhaps not exactly like modern Day of the Dead) when neighbors came together and gave thanks for the crops they had grown. They had to be mindful to keep enough and share enough to make it as community through the cold months. Today we let the food banks worry about feeding society. We follow an unnatural cycle of spending just when we should be doing some saving for future needs. I suggest a few changes we can make to give the earth a better holiday season:
- Buy locally made and locally grown products
- Think twice before buying anything made out of plastic
- Find crafty DIY ways to decorate with up cycled or recycled items
- Teach your kids to give of themselves to those who need help
- Limit the junk food treats as a central holiday theme
- Don’t ask a single person if they’re ready for the holidays
pumpkin spice
glitter pumpkins
Consumption as Culture
December 3, 2012
— 2 Comments
Who is in charge of the decisions you make about consumption? Do your values ever influence what you buy?
Boomers Consume. Congress Sucks. Future Foggy.
November 28, 2012
— 1 Comment
We are given feedback about our economic well being based on consumer behavior and optimism. By assigning value to monetary transactions, but no value to the original raw materials contributed by earth our generation has proclaimed that sucking down resources in mass quantities equals wealth. This is similar to the real estate value of the United States being liberated when Europeans brought property rights and money to America. If we stick to this program, identifying citizens of our nation as the entitled robber barons who have been chosen to use all the natural resources in the world, we will be the repository for a very large landfill of plastic while our currency becomes a joke. We will be able to lift up a middle class in China while we trash the one here that currently needs to buy all the plastic. Those Chinese people can count, and we need to learn to do it too.
In Europe there are countries in which the company is required to lease, not sell, a product like a vacuum cleaner. The company is responsible for the economic model of the value of the merchandise. The company must recycle or dispose of any excess or repair parts, rather than leave this to the customer. What the customer buys is the service of a working vacuum cleaner. This is the opposite of trying to sell as much junk as possible with no promise or expectation that it will work well or last. I do not know the details, but it is a direction that makes a lot of sense. Some value must be assigned to the raw materials pre discovery and pricing by humans. Some responsibility for filling landfills with poorly made garbage must be shifted to those who make and import it.
Boomers invented credit card living and mindless consumption as status symbols. Many have found themselves completely boomed out in middle age, and few have a plan or money for their own retirement. The most popular personal spending habits mirror the government model. Spend lavishly and skip the math. While American families take on deep debt to support Chinese prosperity we are still able to afford to support a congress in the fancy style to which they have become accustomed. Taxpayers will need to pay to fly them all home soon for the holiday reward vacation they will give themselves. They probably all need to fly first class. I wonder if we could swap them out for some Asian lawmakers who count.
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