Christmas Challenge

This year, for reasons that I won't go into here, I gave myself a challenge for my Christmas shopping. I tried to stick to buying as local as possible, buying used, or buying practical things that I would get anyway. The result is that I didn't succeed in many cases, but it was a learning experience none the less. I'll mention of few of the experiences below.

1) Wrapping - Well, it seems most wrapping paper and bows are made far away in China, but Scotch tape is made in the USA. I did end up getting both paper and tape, but many a times I held myself back from getting bows. It was really hard. I love bows, especially big giant, shiny bows for Christmas.

2) Online shopping - Since 2001, nearly 90% or greater of my holiday shopping has been online. I continued to stick with this model, but it did not mesh very well with my challenge. It is sometimes hard to figure out where things are made or from where they are distributed. I was impressed that Amazon did have a significant number of items showing up a "made in usa" search.

3) Software - A lot of software is made in the US, in fact, right here in Austin, TX. Who doesn't need software? Games? Personal organizational tools? There's an app for everything, right? Granted the hardware that runs the software is all made somewhere very far away.

4) Media - I invested a lot in media gifts. I know the blank paper, ink, DVDs are made and printed far away. There are a lot of good local artists and authors of all sorts out there. I probably should do more electronic media, but I just can't quite give up on real books. Change is a process. Maybe that is next year's challenge.

5) Craigslist - If you want to get good stuff, you cannot wait 'til the last minute. I ended up only finding only one thing off Craigslist this year. Maybe next year I need to set up some RSS feed searches so my software does the shopping for me. What fun is that though?

6) Food - I love giving and receiving this. Although these days I often find myself too busy to make food for my family, let alone others, I found tons of online resources to help me send the gift of food. Yay for farmers, chefs and restaurants.

7) Regifting - Yay that's right. Or at least, Xander is helping with this one. He's giving some of his hold things to Aria.


In any event, I enjoyed the shopping challenge this year and will likely try these rules on a more long term basis....hopefully, with better success rate. This is a new thing for me as I have previously only done budget challenges for my shopping. Previous years, I found myself with a lot more time to prepare for holiday giving. Previous years have had a lot different composition of things underneath the tree. Change is good. I think I needed this challenge to revitalize my interest in things beyond surviving my daily life.