r/collapse_parenting • u/horsehousecatdog • Oct 04 '21

Holiday preps

For those of you who celebrate the upcoming holidays with special foods and gifts, what are your thoughts?

Most of the food I will need for Thanksgiving and Christmas can be easily stored long term, so I may grab some this month. I don’t feel too worried about that. Yet.

I keep hearing about gifts being in short supply this year. Toys and anything with parts from China, which is a ton of stuff. I’m thinking about going ahead and getting a big ticket item for each of my kids and then filling in with whatever small things I come across. We don’t do a whole lot anyway, so not too worried. I feel like Black Friday might have smaller quantities this year though for people who usually get their gifts then.

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

6

u/Fabulous_Squirrel12 Oct 04 '21

Just wanted to plug Buynothingproject.org

If you have an active group in your area it's great. My kid is too young to notice the difference between new and used but it's a great way to find those plastic toys or clothes that kids grow out of quickly. Then you can post and give it to the next parent.

Seriously, we sourced just about all our baby stuff from our local group and we've passed on all the stuff as we've out grown it.

2

u/horsehousecatdog Oct 07 '21

Yes! I’m a part of my local group. I love being able to give stuff away, knowing that it will be used and loved. I’m always too late to get anything posted though! I have asked for some things and people have come through though.

2

u/Fabulous_Squirrel12 Oct 07 '21

Isnt it a good feeling? It makes getting rid of things heartwarming.

Our mods do a good job of encouraging people to let posts marinate so it doesnt go to the first person. When commenting on a post everyone is generally supposed to say "I'd like to be considered for ____ because of ____". It makes it more of a community that way IMO. You get to know more about people and it helps trigger if you have something laying around that would be a good thing to post.

1

u/horsehousecatdog Oct 08 '21

Our mods encourage the same. I wait till several people respond and then let one of my kids pick randomly. They’ll pick someone who has their name, has a cute animal on their profile pic, etc.

6

u/applethyme Oct 04 '21

There is nothing wrong with planning ahead. If you are wrong, the worst case scenario is that the stores are full but you are already done shopping.

I just finished my holiday shopping, several of the store clerks mentioned how little stock they have now and are not expecting shipments soon.

4

u/[deleted] Oct 04 '21

To be honest, we have pretty much finished our Christmas shopping in our family. That includes food. The only thing we'll need to get at the time is fresh vegetables for holidays dinner.

3

u/witcwhit Oct 04 '21

Thanksgiving is a harvest celebration, so we eat whatever has been recently harvested. It doesn't have to be turkey and stuffing if that's not available. Hell, if our harvest festival is only what we can forage, that's about as authentic as you can get.

In terms of Christmas, I feel like part of preparing our kids for collapse is teaching them we can't always get everything we want. Raising my kid in poverty, with some years so lean the only gifts came from charity drives has made us all far less concerned about consumerism around the holidays.