Experiences over Material Goods

Today marks the last day of my anti-Black week blog series.

Hopefully you have found the topics I have covered interesting or that you have just skipped over the text and found photos of happy adventuring dogs. Either way thank you for visiting our blog.

To finish off the blog series I wanted to tell a little firsthand experience of Christmas Eve about 10 years ago.

I was celebrating Christmas Eve with my ex’s family. Her niece and nephew were there and it was agreed that they could get their presents after dinner.

If memory serves me correct we were seven adults and two kids. At the start we took it in turn to open our presents.

Very quickly it became apparent that the kids had many more presents and the focus should be on this. It was not particularly late in the day but after the first five gifts the children were becoming tired. Not only tired but overwhelmed and unable to focus on any of the new gifts.

Looking at the piles in front of them they had barely started.

30 minutes later, and with two iPads each, as there had been a family communication error, the little boy actually asked if he could stop opening new presents. The little girl was lying on the sofa.

With each new gift there was less and less excitement and joy, regardless of whether it was what they had wished for.

The magic of Christmas had long left the children.

With one child asleep and the other one now sat in the cardboard box, that one of his gifts had come in, the absurdity of materialism had hit all the adults.

I can guarantee that some of those presents never made it out of the box.

To their credit in the weeks following this eye opening experience the family agreed that going forwards it was better to come together and buy just a few gifts.

When we look back on our own childhoods we rarely say “my childhood was good / bad because I got / didn’t get certain presents”.

The best things in life we will experience and not own.

So in summary for this entire week I will echo the words of American musician and Surfer Jack Johnson “reduce, reuse, recycle”.

Happy weekend

Doggies: Lexi, Sid and Harpo