It’s a tradition as entrenched as mince pies and carol singing – Black Friday is here yet again. What better way to check a few names off the old Christmas list than with a quick splurge on the sales?

There’s a Black Friday bargain for everyone: for your little cousin, there’s this year’s must-have stocking filler, a £135 FurReal Roarin’ Tyler tiger soft toy. This hefty price tag is justified by the fact that it’s “lifelike”. This way, children will be able to gaze deep into Tyler’s adorable eyes and pretend that his real world brethren aren’t being sucked into Earth’s sixth mass extinction (along with humanity when climate change engulfs us all).

What about your partner, the one saddled with crippling student debt? Get them an Amazon Echo, so an artificially intelligent system can have a go at listening to them sob into their pillow after you’ve left for work in the morning. Spawned from the sticky lap of the online giant that originally imported Black Friday to Britain, this genial Eye of Sauron is set to be another best seller this year – so every sad sap in our green and pleasant land can get in on its panopticonic fun.

Yet, I’m left with the question: do we really need all this stuff? In an era where we’re choking our oceans with plastic waste, poisoning the air with exhaust fumes, and setting the planet alight with over consumption, perhaps there are more resourceful ways of engaging in the ritual of gift exchange.

10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Show all 10 1 /10 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A group of emperor penguins face a crack in the sea ice, near McMurdo Station, Antarctica Kira Morris 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Floods destroyed eight bridges and ruined crops such as wheat, maize and peas in the Karimabad valley in northern Pakistan, a mountainous region with many glaciers. In many parts of the world, glaciers have been in retreat, creating dangerously large lakes that can cause devastating flooding when the banks break. Climate change can also increase rainfall in some areas, while bringing drought to others. Hira Ali 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Smoke – filled with the carbon that is driving climate change – drifts across a field in Colombia. Sandra Rondon 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Amid a flood in Islampur, Jamalpur, Bangladesh, a woman on a raft searches for somewhere dry to take shelter. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to sea level rise, which is expected to make tens of millions of people homeless by 2050. Probal Rashid 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Sindh province in Pakistan has experienced a grim mix of two consequences of climate change. “Because of climate change either we have floods or not enough water to irrigate our crop and feed our animals,” says the photographer. “Picture clearly indicates that the extreme drought makes wide cracks in clay. Crops are very difficult to grow.” Rizwan Dharejo 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Hanna Petursdottir examines a cave inside the Svinafellsjokull glacier in Iceland, which she said had been growing rapidly. Since 2000, the size of glaciers on Iceland has reduced by 12 per cent. Tom Schifanella 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A river once flowed along the depression in the dry earth of this part of Bangladesh, but it has disappeared amid rising temperatures. Abrar Hossain 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A shepherd moves his herd as he looks for green pasture near the village of Sirohi in Rajasthan, northern India. The region has been badly affected by heatwaves and drought, making local people nervous about further predicted increases in temperature. Riddhima Singh Bhati 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A factory in China is shrouded by a haze of air pollution. The World Health Organisation has warned such pollution, much of which is from the fossil fuels that cause climate change, is a “public health emergency”. Leung Ka Wa 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Water levels in reservoirs, like this one in Gers, France, have been getting perilously low in areas across the world affected by drought, forcing authorities to introduce water restrictions. Mahtuf Ikhsan

How about spending good, old-fashioned quality time with other people? It is indeed a vintage – even quaint – concept, but when reports show that modern British families are only spending 38 minutes of quality time together on an average weekday, you do start to wonder if we’re doing something wrong.

Christmas nostalgia may hark back to a childhood spent salivating over shiny boxes and amorphous shapes under conifer trees. But after the mystique of the nameless delights had passed, how long did we hold onto these new objects before they lost their lustre, to be consigned to storage cupboards, charity shops and landfill forever more?

Could it actually be that the magic of Christmas resides in languishing at home, temporarily relieved of the stresses of work, in the company of those we love – but often work hard to tolerate? After all, it increasingly seems that beneath all the (sleigh) bells and whistles of advertising, the most precious commodity of all is time.

That’s why this winter, instead of the Black Friday bargains, I’m proposing something different.

I’m gifting each of my nearest and dearest a bespoke investment of the irreversible stuff – like cooking a nice meal with my neighbours or taking my dad on an overnight road trip. Perhaps those memories will last longer than the printer cartridges he gifted me when I was sixteen.