By Reverend Billy and Savitri D

The Holiday Season is upon us: a time to be with family, celebrate the passing of a new year and…shop. When did shopping become so intertwined with the holidays that it can be hard to separate the two? The average American spends an average of 8.5 years of their life shopping and we see one of the biggest spikes in shopping come around the holidays. All this time shopping and our age of insatiable consumerism comes at a cost to us, and our planet.

Take clothing as an example. We all like a pair of new jeans, but the fashion industry now has a larger carbon footprint than airlines. Do we need all these clothes? People in the U.S. are throwing out over 60 pounds of clothes a year. It has reached a point where 60% of all global greenhouse gasses comes from household consumption. It’s us. We are buying this stuff. This flood of plastic toys and polyester fast fashion keeps coming toward us from one direction, but we’re asking for it.

The idea that we’re normalized to equate products with love carries an extra weight of irony because these products are literally killing us. Synthetic fabric made from fossil fuels. Skin cream made from oil. Plastic toys made from oil. Its poison! And it keeps coming. Into our bodies where we get cancer. Into the ocean where the oxygen dies. Into the landfill, into the Earth. The corporations don’t know from irony. Christmas is toxicity with great advertising.

We’ve been sold this holiday story for so long that it can be hard to take back the holidays and reimagine what this season could look like without voracious consumerism. Time spent around the table speaking with our friends and family instead of hours spent shopping for them. New traditions for Christmas trees that do not require cutting down forests or bringing more plastic into our homes.

The Church where I preach is called the Church of Stop Shopping and our choir has been preaching the message to stop shopping for more than a decade — from the streets of Times Square to inside Chase Banks. But companies can buy the air waves and sell you stories of products and the need for shopping. Our greenhouse gas emissions are going up. The recent COP25 climate negotiations ended in failure.

And all the while, people keep on shopping. But what if some of us, or all of us that care about the future of the planet, stopped shopping? What if we took back those gifts that are killing our planet, and ourselves. We propose a Take Plastic Back Friday to confront brand owners, manufacturers and retailers with their gas, oil and greed. This Christmas, we don’t need more toys, fake trees, and cheap clothes made from oil. We need a movement that can help keep this oil in the ground so that we have a safe and healthy planet to celebrate holidays on decades into the future.

We need organizing, legislation, and a growing movement to get us there. Change starts with each of us and our commitment and resolutions to fight for the future we want. For us, that choice can begin with something as simple as bringing plastic back to the stores the Friday after Christmas. Hope to see you at the mall on Friday, December 27th.

Reverend Billy and Savitri D direct the Stop Shopping Choir, a radical performance community based in NYC.