The Times' Style section yesterday discussed the newest addition to the Christmas holidays: the green Grinch. This is the environmentally obsessed family member who is "bent on eradicating the wasteful materialism of the holidays." Focusing on the usual Grinch-like grievances of excessive consumption, this person puts an environmental spin on the most negative aspects of the Christmas season:

[The Grinch] is the family member who is the first to point out, over the bountiful Christmas dinner, that the 2.6 billion holiday cards sold each year in the United States could fill a landfill the size of a football field 10 stories high, or that those conventional lights on the Christmas tree contribute up to nine times as much greenhouse-gas emissions as the leaner-burning L.E.D. models; or that some Christmas-tree growers use as many as 40 different pesticides, as well as chemical colorants, on their crops.

 

Photo:D. Knisely, Creative Commons, Flickr

holidays is limited to one family member at a given Christmas gathering. Rather, I think it's starting to occur to many of us that festivity done for festivity's sake is wasteful. Sending cards is wasteful. Christmas lights are wasteful. Wrapping gifts is wasteful. Even shipping gifts is wasteful. After learning so much about conservation, how can we justify the hypocrisy that comes with celebrating Christmas?

My answer is, I honestly don't know. I wonder about this at other months of the year besides December, when I wrap a gift for someone's birthday or order something online that will be packed and delivered in an environmentally unfriendly way. Are balloons wasteful? Are children's crafts wasteful? Would the strictest environmentalist refuse to do anything joyful that was wasteful? Grinches aren't the only ones that question where the line falls between environmental responsibility and fun.