Intro

Hello listeners and welcome to Fighting Failure. This is the last episode of Season 3: Material World; and just as an advance warning, we’ll be taking a break over the festive season before returning with an all-new season in January 2023.

In this episode we’re going to be talking about Christmas, and how its modern incarnation contributes massively to the consumerism problem that we’ve been discussing in this section.

I’m your host for this episode, Hisham Kanaan

And I’m your co-host, Oscar Archibald

Good things about Christmas

• Family
• Brings some light to a dreary winter in the Northern Hemisphere
• Has transcended its Christian origin to be celebrated by many secular people
  • However this calls into question its significance - a vehicle for social issues
  • Still leads to people of other faiths such as Judaism and Islam to feel left out

Statistics

1. In the UK, household waste (primarily solid domestic waste) usually increases by about 30% in the festive season.
   1. Packaging for products
2. 3000 tonnes of turkey packaging go to waste each holiday season!
3. 75 million edible mince pies are thrown out each year.
   1. Just today I had my Christmas rowing erg regatta, and there were probably 50 uneaten mince pies left on the table, which will inevitably be thrown out
   2. Are mince pies even good??
4. 60 million unwanted presents are given each year.
5. About 49% of all Christmas shopping is performed online
   1. Makes it even more tokenistic
6. according to business waste UK, “The amount of Christmas plastic packaging that was placed in the general waste bin instead of the recycling bin in 2018 was estimated at 114,000 tonnes.”

Problems

• Gift-giving pushed by companies to promote their business interests
  • Christmas sales and advertisements
  • Sale codes and the idea of products going on sale (to promote over-consumerism)
    • Scam element that sale prices can be made up
  • Inflated expectation of how expensive Christmas gifts should be - from a small familial gesture to, perhaps, thousand-dollar computers
• People often don’t wish to receive gifts, except children, but social pressure makes us feel like we ought to, even if the recipient explicitly states they don’t want anything
• Tinsel and other decorative items
  • large amounts of plastic
  • problems for pets
  • electricity usage of lights which are left on for long periods of time
    • especially those crazy American houses which are lit up like discos or smth