We celebrate Christmas here in the Essert-Crutchfield house. We hang lights outside, chop down a tree and stuff it into water and hang lights and decorations all over it. We put up a little train track and various other plug-in type (energy gnawing) decorations. In light of this (pardon the pun), I decided to spend the month of December living a less environmentally thoughtful lifestyle. I decided to quit flipping off lights that are burning in unoccupied rooms, leave the thermostat up all day, run the hell out of the drier, and etcetera. In other words, become Environmentally Un-conscious.
It's been difficult. The switch flipper in me is well-rooted and old. She has a very difficult time remembering that we're trying to see how much worse our bill could be if we were more 'normal'. Of course, there was that year when we never turned off the Christmas lights...not for a solid month. We'll never top that electric bill.
Part of me has something to prove to my husband who is the worst leaver-on-of-lights in the entire household. It never seems to occur to him, or maybe it just doesn't matter to him, that he can turn a switch off and on again when he leaves and enters a room or that maybe drying one pair of jeans is a waste or that taking care of something that could last his whole life makes more sense than allowing it to be ruined and then buying a new one. Ah! I can feel my blood pressure rise just thinking about his lackadaisical attitude toward his and our possessions. Grrr.
But for one month...THIS month...I, too, am being careless and lax. At the same time, though, I cut back our outside decorations by half or better. Less decorations=less stress=less time to put up and take down=Happier Us! We really, really tried to cut back on our gift giving quota, too. I think we may have. We don't really exchange gifts with our friends, though if the mood strikes us, we will buy something for our friends without any expectation of it being an exchange--just a gift that we want to give. I no longer engage in the Christmas card frenzy. We don't send them and, as a result, we only get them from a few die-hard family card senders. We save trees, time, money and a few stress points for me. We have also stopped going on Christmas light viewing adventures and while this saves us some time and gas dollars, it is one part of our holiday traditions that I'd like to ressurect. I LOVE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS!!!!!!!!! Hehe.
Okay, I haven't totally lost consciousness but really do have to admit that it's difficult to be crunchy at Christmastime.
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