Buy Nothing Day
A Very Special Family Celebration
by Deb Williams
Dear Friends and
Family,
Yet another holiday is upon us. Preparations to be made. Invitations to send out. Who can believe that another year has gone by? It’s BUY NOTHING DAY and I almost forgot because there is so little advertising in the papers. Funny that the children didn’t remind me. They treasure our special way of celebrating.
BUY NOTHING DAY is complete with joyous meals and festive traditions. We start at sundown on the Thursday. While the Americans are eating turkey, my Canadian husband arrives home from work, with a formidable box of mismatched tupper-type containers mislaid by his coworkers during the past year. The hours that follow rollick with laughter as we try to match lids and bases. It’s Urban Harvest at it’s finest.
The meal that follows is one that can only be described as high fiber with leftovers served between shag rug samples we’ve been saving in the basement for just this occasion.
The evening is spent around the scrap wood fire knitting garden twine and kneading compost. Then just before bed we bring out the immense bag of bags that lives under the sink and sort through for brightly coloured plastic to hang above the recycle box in hopes that Saint Ornstein, the patron Saint of flattened tin cans and glass milk bottles, will answer our prayers.
Our sleep is fitful and full of environmentally friendly images, but we rise early in anticipation of our newspaper wrapped gifts plucked from back lanes and dumpsters around the city. The rest of the day is spent making paper from the furnace filter and the dryer lint trap. All in all a thoroughly rewarding event hearkening forward to the years ahead we will spend in squalor as our planet slowly dismantles itself.
I must go and reprimand the children who have opened a sawdust stand on the sidewalk. I think the meaning of the day has somehow escaped them.
Yours,
wearing someone else’s old clothes
Deb
Yet another holiday is upon us. Preparations to be made. Invitations to send out. Who can believe that another year has gone by? It’s BUY NOTHING DAY and I almost forgot because there is so little advertising in the papers. Funny that the children didn’t remind me. They treasure our special way of celebrating.
BUY NOTHING DAY is complete with joyous meals and festive traditions. We start at sundown on the Thursday. While the Americans are eating turkey, my Canadian husband arrives home from work, with a formidable box of mismatched tupper-type containers mislaid by his coworkers during the past year. The hours that follow rollick with laughter as we try to match lids and bases. It’s Urban Harvest at it’s finest.
The meal that follows is one that can only be described as high fiber with leftovers served between shag rug samples we’ve been saving in the basement for just this occasion.
The evening is spent around the scrap wood fire knitting garden twine and kneading compost. Then just before bed we bring out the immense bag of bags that lives under the sink and sort through for brightly coloured plastic to hang above the recycle box in hopes that Saint Ornstein, the patron Saint of flattened tin cans and glass milk bottles, will answer our prayers.
Our sleep is fitful and full of environmentally friendly images, but we rise early in anticipation of our newspaper wrapped gifts plucked from back lanes and dumpsters around the city. The rest of the day is spent making paper from the furnace filter and the dryer lint trap. All in all a thoroughly rewarding event hearkening forward to the years ahead we will spend in squalor as our planet slowly dismantles itself.
I must go and reprimand the children who have opened a sawdust stand on the sidewalk. I think the meaning of the day has somehow escaped them.
Yours,
wearing someone else’s old clothes
Deb