Holiday Book Exchange
This Christmas I heard about a local family’s very interesting gift-giving idea. Rather than fighting holiday shopping crowds to hunt down the perfect sweater-vest for Uncle Wayne and the snazziest Snuggie for Aunt Vernita, each family member wrapped up his or her favorite book from the previous year and contributed it to a “Dirty Santa”-style gift exchange.
I thought this book-recycling project sounded like a really cool way to connect with family members who would likely end up with a book they would never have ordinarily picked up. In the best of all possible worlds, maybe families who don’t have much to say to each other (or have a few too many un-civil things to say all the way through Christmas dinner) could at least talk about good books and their reasoning for picking out their particular titles.
The anti-consumerist aspect of it appealed to me as well, as I genrally try to avoid coming within a three-mile radius of a shopping center from late-November to January. On the other hand, this book-exchange idea would present me with a couple of serious problems.
First, I’ve gotten to the point where I almost never actually buy a book. Even if the library system doesn’t have a title in its collection, the surprisingly speedy “Inter-Library Loan” option allows patrons to request just about any title for library staff to track down from other libraries all across the country.
I’ve also found that I’m especially compelled and driven to read library books because of the finite nature of the loan. If I buy a book, it can sit on the shelf for years, decades even, and I won’t necessarily feel like I have to read it. With library books, on the other hand, I can renew it for up to six weeks but I know I’m eventually going to have to give it back. This really works as a serious motivator to either put down a book I’m not enjoying or power all the way to the end of a great read.
Finally, I’m a lot like a struggling Little Leaguer at the end of a season-long slump when it comes to reading. I mean, I just love to have that trophy at the end to keep on the shelf.
There’s a painfully true Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George argue the merits of keeping books they’ve already read, and I definitely fall into the mildly shameful category of people who have to keep them like the antlers of some big game hanging on the wall.
If, for example, I ever finished James Joyce’s Ulysses (hell, if I ever got through the first chapter), there’s no way I could give that book away to Cousin Cletus at the Dirty Santa exchange. I’d prop that baby up on the coffee table as a permanant conversation piece to brag about endlessly to anyone unfortunate enough to ask me what it was doing there.
Not Buying It
Refugees from the consumer carnage of Black Friday might greatly appreciate Judith Levine’s Not Buying It: My Year without Shopping.
At the end of 2003, Levine took stock of her place on the endlessly spinning gerbil’s wheel of consumerism and decided, along with her somewhat reluctant husband, to jump off. After a mini-frenzy of December shopping, including an 11:00 p.m. New Year’s Eve online purchase of a random garden decoration, the Levines vowed to only buy the absolute necessities for the next twelve months.
Not Buying It chronicles the family’s month-by-month struggles to define “necessities” (her husband makes a fairly compelling argument for liquor and wine) and re-think their priorities in the immediate post-9/11 climate where consumption was often equated with patriotism.
Levine is partially motivated by the desire to leave a smaller environmental footprint by consuming less, and she includes some accompanying guilt-laden statistics to bolster her case. The idea of the average American family generating 4 pounds of garbage a day (that’s a cool billion pounds a day nationwide) was enough to bolster this reader’s committment to at least filling up the recycling bin as much as possible.
Ultimately, the book presents a valuable exercise in re-thinking the relative rewards and pleasures of shopping. Levine and her husband are forced to find creative ways to entertain themselves without spending money, and one unintended result found them reveling in the ordinary simplicity of their day-to-day lives. They read more books, had more conversations, and were forced to think more about the value of the things they already had.
Another happy result, as Levine’s December 25 journal entry finds her realizing, was “for the first time in our lives together, we have passed an entire year without a single worried discussion (okay, fight) about money.”
