I’m just a mom caught in the uneasy tension between responsible consumption and holiday excess.
Every December, the same question creeps in, usually somewhere between the second (or twelfth) late-night Amazon order and the moment I catch myself hiding packages in the trunk: am I supposed to feel bad about this?
Not bad in the abstract way — not “capitalism is broken” bad — but personally bad. Ethically compromised. Seriously, what’s a mother to do?
For most of the year, my buying habits are labored and reserved. I take my time — too much time — reading reviews and labels, comparing prices, delaying. My daughter knows the drill and rolls her eyes accordingly: first, we survey the local thrift stores for most clothing before ever setting foot in a big box or department store — or, god help me, the mall. If we can’t find what we’re looking for secondhand, then we check low-impact labels, like Guess for jeans, Eileen Fisher for sweaters, Patagonia for outerwear. Then, if we still strike out, and we absolutely can’t go without, we’ll shop new. For home items, I check Facebook Marketplace for furniture, appliances, and the like. (Most of our furniture is made up of durable vintage pieces older than me.) Other things get repaired, postponed, or, if I can get away with it, quietly dropped from the list altogether.
December removes that resistance almost overnight, though. Now, as a parent, I lean into Christmas in all of its garish consumerism. Sure, I still survey the thrift stores (I found three brand-new, still-in-sealed-packaging board games at Goodwill just last week!). But I am not above loading up the Amazon cart. Like every parent, I’ve got an amazing kid who deserves a memorable Christmas (especially after this last year). And with thrift stores more competitive (and pricier) than ever, it’s increasingly challenging to find secondhand gifts.
The struggle is real, though: trying to balance the fun of holiday consumerism with teaching my daughter to be more mindful is as challenging as it gets. Especially when we look at the numbers: Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, Americans generate about 25 percent more household waste, adding an estimated five million extra tons of trash over the holiday period, largely from packaging (rather than food, although food waste is still a major problem in the U.S.).
Roughly 40 percent of global plastic production is used for packaging, most of it single-use, and much of it unrecyclable. Holiday shopping has shifted heavily online, with e-commerce purchases producing nearly five times more packaging waste than in-store buying due to individual fulfillment and protective materials. Returns add another layer, with holiday returns in the U.S. generating more than 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, roughly equivalent to the yearly emissions of 3.5 million cars.
Amazon, of course, sits at the center of this system by its sheer size. The online retail giant is expected to account for nearly 40 percent of holiday purchases this year. While it has made efforts to reduce plastic, much of the packaging material isn’t accepted by standard recycling programs. Some of it escapes waste streams altogether, entering rivers and oceans where it never truly goes ‘away’.
Part of what I think about this time of year, as I buy the new things, the things I know my daughter will forget about by March, is that consumption is treated as a binary: careful or careless, ethical or unethical. There’s little room for the idea that behavior can be time-bound and culturally enforced without defining someone’s values wholesale. Buying as a habit looks different from buying as a ritualized act that appears once a year before it recedes. I mean, what if we reduced our constant impulse buying, but still went a little extra for Christmas? How would that look for the planet, for our wallets, for our relationship to All The Things? After all, buying less has never meant buying never.
There’s also a class ease embedded in how consumption gets discussed. Minimalism functions differently when abundance has always been available; opting out feels empowering when you’ve already grown up with materially full holidays. It’s easier to moralize excess after the fact.
None of this is enough to make the waste disappear, though. The packaging still enters the system. The trucks still run harder in November and December than they do in March. Acknowledging that reality doesn’t require collapsing the conversation into personal guilt — particularly guilt aimed at parents (and disproportionately at mothers), who are expected to manage ethics, logistics, and childhood expectations simultaneously.
Is it possible to temper our purchases outside of December? If analog is supposed to have the 2026 we keep hearing about, can that apply to how we consume things as well as experiences? After all, social media is a big reason we shop in the first place. Recent findings show that 85 percent of Gen Z consumers make purchasing decisions based on social media. Those choices affect volume in ways a single month of abstention never could.
While my tween certainly has no frame of reference, I’m old enough to remember how shopping used to be: Before we could click a ‘buy now’ button, back when the only option was making time for trekking out to a store, we weren’t necessarily less prone to impulse buying, but we were less prone to constant buying. It’s not off the mark to say that these days, nearly every day is Christmas. Whether we’re getting a DoorDash for dinner, groceries delivered, or a new couch, the thrill of the package has led us into the golden age of Consumerism.
That’s the part that feels so off to me: we’re scolding December as if it’s the outlier, when the real shift happens during the rest of the year. Convenience has normalized itself into a daily routine. Same-day shipping, one-click ordering, frictionless returns, meals arriving at the door because cooking feels like too much — these aren’t outlier behaviors anymore. They’re our baseline. December just concentrates them enough to make the excess visible.
Framing Christmas as the moral problem lets the rest of the year off the hook. It turns structural overconsumption into a seasonal lapse instead of what it actually is: a constant hum. The trucks run year-round. The packaging shows up every week. The waste doesn’t wait for Santa. If conscious consumerism only appears as a performance in December, it isn’t a real measurable shift — it’s theater.
Now, as I sneak in one last shopping run, one last effort to hide the bulge of gifts, I don’t think the reckoning lies in whether my daughter has a pile of presents — new and not-so-new — on one morning in December. It lives in what we normalize the other 364 days of the year. If we bought fewer things overall, waited longer, repaired more, accepted inconvenience as a default rather than a failure, Christmas wouldn’t carry quite so much weight. And, maybe, then we wouldn’t need guilt to do the work that systems and habits were always meant to handle instead.
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