Roses and hearts are unavoidable from your vision now? Because Valentine’s day is here very soon! As many of you have realised festivals are heavily commercialised now, there are still many more falling into this trap willingly because gifting is one of the ways to express love and cute things are too difficult to resist isn’t it?
Yes, buying one or two things doesn’t hurt. But is it meaningful? Useful? Would you and your partner, care for it long term? These are the questions we should ask ourselves whenever buying something as gifts.
If you are giving a card, handmade it if can, or buy recycle friendly or compostable cards. Most importantly, write HEARTFELT messages in it! Make it meaningful! I am really glad the card-gifting culture still exist in UK especially even among people in 30s and above. But I noticed most people only writes very generic greetings or wishes instead of meaningful messages.
To me, the card is designed by an artist, produced in a factory operated by people, and using resources of the planet. Therefore, I think it’s better to make it’s ‘life’ worthwhile instead of just another card potentially going into the recycling bin. I truly appreciate handmade cards and meaningful messages that connect one another.
In Malaysia, card-gifting’s been long gone. Ever since digitalisation, we send festive e-cards or write messages on social media more. But for that being said, I still keep all handmade cards or cards with meaningful messages back in primary and high school days in a special box. It never fails to give me a good laugh and a good walk down the memory lane when reading them occasionally.
Don’t you agree any card or gift should give this kind of meaningful value?
A lot of our gifting culture including various cultural festivals has taken a toll of the environment due to unnecessary production especially packaging, that ends up in landfills. I worked in shopping malls for many years and seeing the amount of things we produced during festive seasons which displayed in events and campaigns, is shockingly unnecessary. Reduce and reuse is ultimate key! Oh I can write another post about this separately. Back to Valentine’s day!
Nowadays, there are loads of businesses using words like ‘sustainable’, ‘bio-degradable’, ‘compostable’ to make you feel okay to purchase. Well, it’s your choice to go the extra mile and check the credibility of it. Otherwise, here’s something simple that doesn’t break your bank, why not going for minimal to zero waste ideas instead!?
- Huge hug with lots of kisses.
- Buy fresh produce from your local green grocers, home cook a romantic meal together.
- Support your local favourite bakery for baked goods.
- Enjoy a great show, movie or any performance in the theatre.
- Have a nice meal in your favourite local independent restaurants.
- Stroll on the beach, national park or anywhere near to the nature, enjoy the view and chat your hearts out!
- Donate to a nature conservation (Plant a tree, save an animal etc.)
- Gift cards of Gift vouchers. Your partner would figure out what they would buy and will keep it for long term.
Besides your partner or anyone you loved, you and I will need to agree that we are definitely going to have a longer relationship with Mother Nature! No one’s lonely on Valentine’s because she is everyone’s valentine and she loves you more than anybody do.
Care for her, conserve the love that she has given to us unconditionally.
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