My family stopped participating in the commercial side of Christmas 20 years ago

This was right around the time that all of my parents' kids were grown up and out of the house. My other siblings moved a bit further away from North Carolina than I did and when we would get back together around the holidays we kind of found out accidentally that other than me, because I live in the same county as my parents, the rest of us didn't really know all that much about one another and the gift-giving was done moreso out of a sense of obligation rather than actual desire to do so. Most of what we got for one another ended up being things that the recipient had to pretend to like and we all knew that they were never going to actually be used.

One year 2 of my family bought, accidentally, the same book for my mother as a gift, only to discover that she had already purchased it the day it was released and had finished it weeks before they arrived.

I think that was actually the straw that broke the camel's back and from that point forward we all made a deal that we were no longer going to purchase gifts for one another in the future.

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_ridiculous!

Another thing that happened was that some of my family members are more affluent than others and even though we didn't mean to do it, gift-giving kind of became a bit of depressing thing for the ones in my family that make less money because they can't really afford to be buying hundreds of dollars in presents. The main thing was that we were buying useless crap for people that we don't really know that much about.

I was quite happy when my father suggested around the dinner table that we don't get gifts anymore and I think the rest of the family was equally pleased to let the consumerism tradition get left behind. Only one of my siblings has children of their own and they still get gifts, but they are the only ones.

The rest of us just divide up duties such as preparing dinner or drinks and we treat the holidays as a gathering of getting to know eachother again every year. I really prefer this. Even though I do pretty well financially I am a lot like my parents in that just because I have money, doesn't mean that I like throwing it away. Almost all of the things we were giving one another didn't have much of a purpose and the sweaters and knick-knacks likely got donated to Salvation Army or something like that. I know that I don't wear any of the things that were given to me, except for trying it on the day that I opened the package.

Now we just get together and drink and eat too much for a week and then we all go back to our lives. I guess it sounds a little bit sad if you think about it a bunch, but this is just the way that my family operates and I prefer it that way.

I wonder if there are other people out there whose family has made similar choices around the holidays? I'm pretty sure that Amazon, Target, and other retailers are probably not very happy about this if it ends up being widespread!