We’ve hurtled into December like sleepwalkers toward a bright, noisy cliff. The lights are louder. The offers get louder. The lists thicken and the pressure squeezes—so politely—until the thing that once made the season sacred becomes a frantic to-do.
I want to say something unlovely and honest: most of the gifts we give will be forgotten. Most of the boxes we wrap will be opened with a polite smile and later—if we’re honest—vanish into drawers, basements and landfills. We can’t remember half of what we received last year. We can’t even find it. We may never use it. And yet, we keep doing it. We keep bowing to the ritual as if ritual itself were salvation.
Think about that. We hunt and hustle for things that will not hold us. We shop for evidence that we are thoughtful, generous, “on it.” We check off names as if completion equals love. Tradition becomes the drumbeat under which we march—unquestioning, convenient, and slightly hollow.
There’s a grief here that we rarely name. It’s not only about waste or money (though both matter). It’s a grief about the theft of our freedom. Somewhere between the Thanksgiving leftovers and New Year’s Eve, we hand over our agency. We perform rituals because it’s expected, not because they feed the soul. The original meaning of celebration—communal rest, gratitude, repair—gets buried under packages and Pinterest-perfect perfection.
This December, I am daring us to feel the ache. Let it break you open. Look at your stacks of receipts. Open the closet and let the unloved gifts speak to you. Hear the quiet accusation: we have been busy being busy. We have been mistaking motion for meaning. We have been substituting things for the tender work of presence.
We do this because it’s easier to buy than to be. It’s easier to hand a box across a table than to sit with someone and listen to their story. It’s easier to send a photo of a present than to carve time for a call. The market helps us forget. The boxes distract us from the fact that what people most secretly want is not our stuff, but our steadiness, our attention, our time.
So, let’s dare to do December differently—and not in tiny, performative ways. Let’s get raw. Let’s admit we’ve been complicit. Let’s choose freedom over habit.
Here’s how radical tenderness looks: give fewer things and more time. Trade one expensive “surprise” for three real conversations. Replace impulse purchases with repair kits and handwritten notes. Give a promise you’ll keep—a dinner, a child’s music recital attendance, a house call. Let your gifts be invitations to presence rather than props for obligation.
Ask yourself: what if our traditions were redesigned to preserve us instead of consume us? What if the centerpiece of our table was not more, but meaning—stories we tell aloud, apologies we finally speak, hands that help rather than hands that unwrap? What if we let silence and smallness be the loudest ornaments?
I don’t mean to moralize—there’s no purity test here. There are years when presents are joyful medicine, and there are family rituals we cherish. But the question is this: are we choosing these rituals, or are we obeying them unconsciously? There is power in choosing.
This season, choose to want less so you can be more. Choose to shop your home first—re-gift a book that changed you, mend a sweater, make a playlist. Choose to give economy, not excess: a shared potluck, a volunteer afternoon, a subscription to a local farm box, a plant that breathes with the home. Choose presence as the currency of love.
If this sounds demanding, good. December is supposed to be demanding—not of our credit cards, but of our hearts. It is supposed to dismantle the small urgencies that keep us from real connection. In the end, the bravest gift is the one that cannot be thrown away: a memory, a repaired relationship, a quiet night when someone listens fully. Those are the gifts you will not need to find a year from now because they will live in you.
Open your hands this month. Not to hold more, but to give away the heavy need to impress. Let the season be stripped down until what remains is true: the faces you love, the stories that stitch you together, the small acts that last.
Give the gift you can’t forget. Give yourself.