Decorate with Tissues?

Need I say more?

This is some pretty sad marketing. Perhaps the creatives are imagining you have a very sentimental holiday needing tissues while you watch It's a Wonderful Life with your family. That would be better than suffering through Christmas with a drippy nose or allergies when you visit friends with pets.

Consumer or Citizen

I'm switching gears a little here.

Late October, November and early December have been spent in much the same way as in previous years. Picking cranberries and turning them into sauce. Making a hearty Thanksgiving meal from CSA veggies and great stock from the turkey bones, etc. I felt it would be kind of repetitive posting that stuff again.

Instead, I've been toying with the idea of posting my impressions of the marketing and political messages that come my way. My sources are limited since I rarely watch commercial TV or listen to anything but public radio. I don't go to malls and have tried to limit the catalogs and marketing that comes to my mailbox.

Still our world is filled with messages to consume and the detritus of that consumer lifestyle.

This came into my mailbox this week:

 An unsolicited plastic sleeve containing a cardboard flyer with coupon, a styrofoam pad and a plastic and foil Nutella container with less that .5 oz of product. The entire mailer weighted 1.5 oz. This week I found a blog about a zero waste living. While I'm not there yet, I do compost, recycle everything I can and try to reduce and reuse what I buy. Getting things like this in the mail doesn't help (and in fact makes me quite angry). I plan to send a critical email to the company that makes Nutella asking them not to market in this way. They will probably get far fewer complaints than the number of people who will use the coupon to make a purchase. Nutella, by the way, while marketed as a nut spread has sugar and palm oil as its first 2 ingredients.