Fete Lifestyle Magazine December 2018 - Holiday Issue | Page 38

Our PRESENT Should Be Our PRESENCE

By Sally Pederson

believe the world has become way too materialistic, especially during the holidays. Too many people focus on getting and giving gifts and miss out on what is truly important: LOVED ONES.

With day to day life and the added pressure of “having to buy gifts for other people”, it becomes too much for some. Many years ago, Christmas was my favorite holiday but it just became too much pressure for me. I’m not just talking about financial pressures, but also the wandering through overcrowded stores with other stressed out people trying to find something the recipient will hopefully like.

A 2015 New York Times article noted that the holidays saw annually about $65 billion in returns, a quarter of the entire year’s worth of returns. So why do we get so stressed out? Why do we spend money we shouldn’t be spending or don’t have (usually by going into credit card debt), just so someone else (or even ourselves) has the added hassle and more stress by having to go return it? And when we return that less than desirable gift, we only hope the person who gave us the gift never asks anything about it. Even worse, that same article goes on to say that, "Little known to shoppers, however, is that a majority of returned items never make it back to retailers’ shelves. Instead, the items wind their way through liquidators, wholesalers and resellers, many of the purchases ending up in landfills. According to some estimates, as much as two million tons of returned items — most of it undamaged merchandise — are thrown away each year, enough to fill over 200,000 garbage trucks." This Is Crazy!

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