I’m giving you nothing for Christmas

A great friend forwarded me this. I wanted to share:

I got you nothing this year! I mean it.

You and I think alike. We both hate the cluttered lives we have. No wonder people are stressed all the time. We live in an age of “affluenza,” too much stuff, stuff that is killing us. Our stuff is killing the planet. All this stuff is killing our relationships. If only it were just physical things! Now we have too much email, too many phone calls, too many text messages, too many status updates, too many followers and too many people to follow.

I don’t want to add to that. I don’t want to pollute your life any more, pollute our relationship with something you have to pretend you like, and then pretend you didn’t send it off to Goodwill. I don’t want to pollute the environment with more plastic wrapping, cause more wars in Africa over precious resources.

So, this year, I am giving you nothing.

I wanted to give you something. I wanted you to know how much I value our relationship. It is rare to meet someone like you, who fills my life with joy, listens when I am sad, makes me happier when I’m around you, and keeps me going when I am apart from you. I wanted something to commemorate that relationship between us. But, truly, nothing would ever last that really represents what you mean to me.

So, here are nothings I want to give to you:

Put nothing in your basement: The next time I am visiting, I’ll come over and spend three hours putting things into bags with you, and then take them all to Goodwill. You could have nothing in your basement, too!

Put nothing in your calendar for an evening: I’ll come over and babysit the kids for three hours. You can just let me know when you want to do it, and you can choose what you want to place in that nothingness. Spontaneity? Fine wine? A foreign film?

Put nothing in your inbox: I want to remove the stress that your email has become. Let me spend some time getting your inbox to nothingness. I’ll go through your email and filter emails out for you so that you have a permanently organized inbox. I’m a computer professional, let me handle it!

Put nothing in a car: Let’s go for a drive, and just be together, with nothing to say. We can plan where we want to go, and gather some music together, and just drive. What would it be like to have quiet time for an hour or two in the comfort of just us, no complaining, no stress, no agenda, nothing to resolve?

Add nothing to your life: For a whole month this year, I’ll promise to stop leaving voicemails, stop leaving text messages, and stop clicking “like” on Facebook when I see things about you. Instead I’ll do nothing other than stop by and say hello for a moment. I say that spontaneous moment, if we can find it in our busy lives, will be the more memorable thing for both of us that month.

You can choose one or more of these gifts of nothing, whatever suits your fancy. Nothing would make me happier.

Lastly, these are truly gifts of nothing. I want you to think nothing of not using them if they don’t work for you. If they feel like “something” to you, full of compromise, or laden with anxiety that I will come over and ask about the gift, then you can choose to let them return to nothing, nothing more than a thought in someone’s head. That’s all they ever were anyway.

Happy Holidays!