Rebecca Parker looks at how we can all still be gluttons, but with slightly clearer consciences, over the festive period.

There is a moment, somewhere between the first and the twenty-fourth of December of any given year, when one may well be suddenly overcome with the urge to run screaming off a nearby cliff. Perhaps you are standing in the scented soap aisle of Boots; perhaps your arms and shoulders are aching with the strain of carrying shopping bags, which are filled with all manner of wonderful things that are destined to belong to other people.

Perhaps your nose stings with the cold and the first signs of a tinsel-induced headache are beginning to appear. You survey the rows of gauze-enveloped toiletries with a heavy heart and a runny nose.

Then the moment arrives. However, unless you are shopping in Dover’s cliff-top branch of Boots, it might be difficult to immediately act on your impulse. This scenario, potentially dangerous for your health, has the potential to lead to something possible.

Instead of heading straight to the nearest sharp drop, take a deep breath and focus your debilitating ennui into something far more useful: revolution.

The revolution in question? One to overthrow the wastefulness and excess of the Christmas period and the tidal wave of tat that floods the nation every single year.

Consider for a moment how many gifts you receive each Christmas. Then consider how many of those gifts you actually like, appreciate and use. What happens to the unwanted gifts? Are they left to gather a thick carpet of dust in the cupboard under the stairs, donated to a charity shop or disposed of?

These orphaned gifts are just another addition to the mountains of stuff that is left behind in the wake of the festive season. The waste we produce over such a short period of time is immense and rather alarming.

During this ever increasingly commercial holiday, the UK produces around three million tonnes of waste, a number which is only going up and up every year. Landfill sites are inundated with food, bought in a frenzy on Christmas Eve by a nation terrified with the prospect of having to cope without Tesco for one whole day, and then thrown away once it has either passed its sell-by date or when no one can stomach another chipolata.

Wrapping, packaging, Christmas cards, that weird and seemingly redundant layer of tissue paper in shoe boxes – it all builds up. Then, of course, the absolute gems our relatives pick out (“What a lovely pair of… faux-leather dungarees”) that make us grimace as we unwrap them are stuffed into the back of a wardrobe, left to lead a lonely existence, rejected even by Mr Tumnus and doing no one any good.

It’s easy to tut and mutter that it’s simply disgraceful, but the truth is that although Christmas is still officially a religious celebration there is very prominent group of people – if not a majority – who celebrate the holiday without any significance placed on its origins.

For this sector of society Christmas is really about present-giving and receiving, visiting family, eating and being merry until it is impossible to be any merrier, and there is nothing to say that this is necessarily wrong.

So, if Christmas is a celebration of abundance and indulgence, perhaps it is as important to non-religious revellers to spend too much, eat too much, and give too much as it is for others to go to church.

This is not to suggest that commercialism and material goods replace faith in this instance, just that the holiday becomes a different event that holds different importance for different people.

It may be, then, that some claim this excessive consumerism is ‘tradition’, but it doesn’t change the fact that the problem of waste remains. After years of slightly patronising reprimands, environmental warnings may have begun to lose their impact and effectiveness, but the issue is as prevalent now as ever.

Living in the twenty-first century has become a balancing act of the modern and the quaint, luxury and responsibility.

The question is this: Do you spend your very last five pound note on yet another lavender scented soap basket for your auntie Marge, or do you buy a large cup of strong coffee and send auntie Marge the bottle of bath oil you received twelve long months ago from cousin Harry? It could be more ethical to do the latter.

‘Recycling’ gifts in this way is just one way to soften the blow on both pockets and the planet. Yes, it is a little cheap, but so are students.

You could turn it into a festive game with your family, like a year-long round of pass the parcel. Who will get the dusty bottle of peach liqueur and that pungent, muslin-ensconced pouch of potpourri? Whoever it lands on has to listen to Great Uncle Scott drunkenly reminisce about the Stone Age, or the forties, or whatever.

There are other simple, if not so amusing, ways to reduce your ecological impact too. The usual suspects are much to do with simple common sense: reusing wrapping paper, not buying so much food on Christmas Eve (seriously, it’s just one day) and recycling as much as is possible.

As far as gift-giving goes, if you find yourself reaching for the standard ‘fancy toiletry set’ perhaps consider whether it is worth it or not, and if the recipient will even get any joy from such a generic present. After all, there doesn’t seem much point if you’re not even practising that most basic of Christmas traditions – spreading merriment and cheer like an abnormally sparkly disease.

Perhaps consider non-material gifts this year. Promises of meals in nice restaurants or regular lunch-dates, ‘experience’ gifts like bungee-jumping or paragliding, tickets to the cinema or theatre or gigs, and enrollment in cooking lessons or singing lessons can be at least equally satisfying gifts to give or receive. If the anticipation is better than the thing itself, then these types of presents will only extend that feeling.

Besides, meeting your cliché quota for the day, whatever happened to the true Spirit of Christmas? The one sold to us by years of nauseating festive fables churned out by Hollywood, where all anyone needs to be happy at this time of year is the people they love and some perfectly timed snow, all against some twinkly piano music. That’s pretty attainable, right?

Yes, another another cliché is inevitably approaching with some speed, but regardless, perhaps Christmas really shouldn’t be about receiving gifts or spending money. Perhaps it ought to be a time to play ridiculous board games with your family, wear hats with large bobbles and sing custom-written (and invariably rude) lyrics to annoying and repetitive Christmas songs.

So, when that event-horizon in Boots finally arrives, just stop. Go for a coffee, defrost your toes and wrap up last year’s bottle of bath oil for auntie Marge. She might even send it back to you next year.