Have an authentic Christmas why don’t you

Hey tipsters (tippies, tiperifics, tiptantulors), here is my tip from Christmas. Now that it’s the middle of January it’s more of a reflection on the past. However, the best time to really think about what Christmas means is probably not two weeks before (or, as my mum said on Christmas Day, “NOT TODAY SARAH!”)

99 tips for a better world: have an authentic Christmas (11 of 99)

I’m going to take a guess that you feel ambivalent towards Christmas.

I certainly do. Deep, wide-ranging, conflicting ambivalence that is harder to unravel than just getting through the season without asking too many questions. So I don’t.

I struck it lucky in the personality and preferences lottery for this time of year. I love wandering through a supermarket listening to the Beach Boys sing Blue Christmas. I think Christmas decorations are fun and anything can be improved by draping a string of flashing lights over it.

Yet, I feel conflicted by the rampant consumerism of Christmas. I also feel conflicted by the overuse of the cliché ‘rampant consumerism’. I feel confused about the secularisation of a religious holiday – I am less bothered by the secularisation than I am the meaning-vacuum left behind. In practical terms Christmas Day tends to be more about recovering at my mum’s place from a frantic December than a celebration of anything much at all.

I am also ambivalent about Christmas naysayers. There is an abundance of people highlighting all that is wrong with Christmas. I understand the compulsion to express your concerns about the wall-to-wall advertising binge that starts in October. But there also seems something counterintuitive about it – “this-is-a-holiday-about-kindness-and-love-and-you’re-all-crap-and-doing-it-wrong!”

Despite my ambivalence, or perhaps because of it, all I know is that I would rather be topping up the reserves of Christmas cheer than pulling out the plug and letting it drain. So I get into “the Christmas spirit” and give presents and share food and decorate a Christmas tree. I put aside those niggling thoughts and get through to the 26^th of December with a smile on my face.

But what if my ambivalence is part of the problem? I’m bothered by the mindless way we plough through this period, and yet my current survival technique is to mindlessly plough through this period.

This year I will strive to unravel some of my ambivalence and cut through the noise. I will ask myself what Christmas means to me and try to celebrate accordingly. An authentic celebration of Christmas will be unique to each one of us – a representation of our histories and our values and the family and friends we celebrate with (or don’t). For some of us it will be bells and whistles, for others quiet reflection. But I think we will instinctively know it when we see it.

In my search for meaning I will do my best to avoid Christmas clichés about “the true meaning of Christmas” (what exactly would that be then?).

I will also be wary of “true meaning of Christmas” clichés about volunteering at soup kitchens (do we even have soup kitchens in Australia?) While I question the advertising and shopping I will also question the imagery I’ve been fed through American movies and Christmas catalogues since the day I was born.

I’m not sure yet what Christmas does mean to me. Although, I heard a great quote last night that struck me might encapsulate the whole thing:

Well, I mean, you know, the longer I work and live the simpler my theology gets. And there’s many, many things I’m willing to entertain and think about and talk about, but fundamentally it still comes back to that God is love. And I mean that pretty literally, that God is, if nothing else, and that’s a big if, but if nothing else, God is that force that drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and care for each other and respond to each other. And for me, that is actually enough.*

*from the podcast, “Presence in the Wild” with Kate Braestrup, On Being, December 13 2012 (listen to it at http://www.onbeing.org)

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99 tips for a better world: enjoy a hot shower (4 of 99)

It’s tip day over at Lip!

I hate cold water.

I wanted you to know that before we embark on a discussion about my complicated relationship with gratitude. Allow me to lie down on the therapist’s couch and tell you about it.

As a kid, the nuns at my school would tell us, ‘Eat all of your lunch. Remember the starving children in Africa’. They said that to you too? Classic teacher move.

I would respond, ‘If the kids in Africa are so starving, why don’t I send them my leftovers?’ You said that too? Classic smartarse kid move.

Ever since it dawned on me that my life was one of privilege by global standards, I had a lot of guilt about it. I found it hard to enjoy many of the pleasures available to me knowing that it was largely the luck of the draw. Born in Australia = have a nice life. What about the people who didn’t have a nice life? Bully for them?

It was hard to grasp what my lunch had to do with children in Africa though. What I realise now that I didn’t realise then is that the nuns were setting up the building blocks of gratitude.

Gratitude is very popular these days. It sits right up there with peace, love and understanding as a term roundly celebrated by people who like inspirational fridge magnets. I agree that being thankful for what I have and not taking it for granted is important. So why then do I feel a bit icky about expressing gratitude?

If I think about all that I am grateful for, my next thought is about all that other people who don’t have those things. And then I ask myself, ‘Sarah, how can you sit here and bathe in all this wealth and prosperity when others have so little?

Buzz kill.

When it came time to make decisions about my career I followed a path into international development. I thought it would allow me the greatest chance of addressing inequality in the world. Perhaps I was also hoping to alleviate some of my guilt.

One of my first jobs was in Aceh, Indonesia, which had been devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami.

I arrived in Aceh three years after the tsunami hit, and while the basic recovery mission was over, there was still a huge international presence working to re-establish infrastructure, services and governance.

Life was different there, and I took most of it in my stride. I had to conform to clothing restrictions, couldn’t walk far alone, the food was ordinary, and frequent earthquakes gave me the jitters. These things, at their worst, prompted a whinging session with a friend over some mie goreng.

There was one thing however that could have brought me to tears every single day.

I didn’t have a shower. Instead I had a bak mandi.

The bak mandi is, for all intents and purposes, a well in the corner of your bathroom. It sits full of water most of the time, ready for you scoop out water and splash it all over yourself. It is very effective.

But the water was cold, and the mornings in Aceh were cold. I had to slowly and methodically pour cold water all over myself again and again until I was clean. Do I need to remind you that I hate cold water?

Do I need to remind you that Aceh experienced unimaginable destruction of life, property and livelihood as a massive earthquake brought building to the ground and then a giant wave tore through what was left of the crumbling province? Over 170,000 people were killed and 500,000 made homeless.

And I don’t like cold water.

So my guilt skyrocketed…right?

Surprisingly, it did the opposite. My longing for a warm shower taught me about my own wants and needs. I realised that I could live without most of the comforts I had grown up with, but there were some things I did want and no amount of acknowledging suffering in the world would take my longing away.

I came back to Australia so deeply grateful for all that my life in Australia afforded me, even the things that are far from necessary: raw vegetables, fast internet, soft sheets, footpaths, and hot showers in every home.

Finally, I understood what the nuns were trying to teach me. Only when we feel deep gratitude for the privilege and comfort in our lives can we truly appreciate what it would be like not to have it.

Imagine the impact if everyone on earth felt gratitude for all that they had, whether it is money or love or good health. We might also truly have empathy for those without money or love or good health.

Wouldn’t that make a better world?

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99 tips for a better world: buy fairtrade coffee (1 of 99)

Cross posted on the glorious Lip Mag – over here.

Also on Lip today:

modern ms manners: a note on office etiquette

small screen sirens: on nudity

healthy bytes: should you drink coffee?

I had planned to write a column today espousing the value of Fairtrade coffee. I was going to fill the page with encouraging words to invite you to make a conscientious choice when buying your next flat white. Then I thought about Lipreaders, and decided against it. I don’t need to convince you to buy Fairtrade coffee, right?

Buying Faitrade is one of the easiest things you can do to redress the inequality of the global supply chain.

If your regular cafe doesn’t serve Fairtrade (or another reputable ethical certification), go to another cafe. Even better, ask them to switch. If they tell you Fairtrade beans are more expensive, point out that the cost of a caffé latte is influenced by many factors – you can easily find a good Fairtrade coffee for the same price or less than an unfair one.

If they tell you Fairtrade coffee doesn’t taste as good, remind them that Fairtrade has come a long way since the 1990s and that some of the best coffee in Melbourne is Fairtrade certified or at least consciously grown and purchased.

If they don’t take seriously the impact of their business on the lives of poor farmers and workers in the developing world, go to another cafe. If you’re like me and not a huge fan of confrontation, write them a note, or use social media to inquire about the origins of their coffee beans.

The thing about coffee is that it embodies so perfectly the inequity of global trade. I pay three or four dollars for a lovingly-curated coffee experience each morning, noting whether it was too hot, too cold, too bitter, too weak or myriad other sins. The barista invests skill and passion into the creation of my drink and can tell me more about the history of the beans than I know about some members of my extended family.

Often, at the other end of the supply chain is a farmer who struggles in the way that so many food producers struggle against the vagaries of nature, insecure environments, corruption, illness, competition against mega farmers with access to more advanced farming techniques. The farmer also struggles against powerful buyers who do whatever they can to reduce the price they pay for a product. Also part of this system is low-paid workers, harvesting and packaging beans for shipping to distant lands.

The other thing about coffee is that all of the above is so well known and efforts to address those problems are all over the place. Fairtrade and other ethical certification systems aim to address the injustices of conventional trade, which traditionally discriminates against the poorest, weakest producers. How effective these efforts are is debated in the industry and by academics, but for my money the evidence favours Fairtrade. So I will hedge my bets and make sure my coffee is certified. It’s too easy.

I mean that literally. It’s too easy to choose the more ethical option, so there is no reason not to. Don’t pat yourself on the back for buying Fairtrade — just buy it in the same way that you buy dolphin-free tuna.

In my job, I just spent the last year ushering in a system whereby the organisation I work for has committed to using Fairtrade products more often. My colleagues and I avoid telling people they have to buy Fairtrade coffee; we just make it easier for them to do it, and convince them that it’s a good idea.

Here, on these pages, I don’t have to be so diplomatic. If you don’t know where your coffee beans are coming from, find out. It’s just too easy.

Find out more about Fairtrade at www.fairtrade.com.au

Women hold up…

I moved to a new apartment on Monday but didn’t get electricity until Thursday. As a consequence I maintained a schedule this week of:

• moving,
• unpacking,
• finding somewhere to sleep once it got too dark to unpack any more (thank you to guardian angels who took me in),
• getting up and going home early each morning to get ready for work,
• going to work, then
• doing it all over again.

On Wednesday I was still in high spirits, if miffed at the state of electricity companies in Victoria (tell ANYONE you know you’re having trouble with your electricity and they will tell you an even more harrowing tale).

By Thursday I was exhaaaausted.  Zombiedom kicked in in a big way. So I muddled my way through work that day, traipsing back and forth between the office and home to check whether the electricity had been turned on.

I’d like to think it was my zombie state that caused me to follow a few more links on the internet than usual. I am pleased I did because I found the breathtaking preview (what we Australians call movie trailers) for Half the Sky.

I’m already on the look out for when it will be screening in Australia so I can arrange for everyone I know to see it. If you know anything about a planned Australian release, let me know.

This film follows the book of the same name by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Learn more about the Half the Sky movement here.

 

Happy collision on a Friday

Love those moments when two things you love collide.

Sarah Wilson posts about Maira Kalman.

How are we all so brave?

P.S. for an added bonus, read the comments below Sarah’s post. Not a troll in sight. Just lovely people.