Christmas supermarket till receipts wrap around the world – every week!

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Over 26,000 miles of receipts issued as waste reaches 'epidemic' levels

British supermarkets issue over 26,000 miles of till receipts every week in the run up to Christmas – more than enough paper to go around the entire circumference of the world – and virtually all of it is wasted.

These are the findings of a leading expert in waste and recycling, which has calculated that around 270 tons of till receipts are printed out for customers, many of which are thrown straight into bins along with non-recyclable single-use carrier bags.

Most of those receipts, and everything else that is printed from the till roll, is also on a special kind of paper that does not really recycle well, if at all. It is a so-called thermal paper as the printers does not actually ink but heat to create the “imprint”. In addition to that the paper is laced with BPA, which is a known health risk.

Stores that print out additional offers along with the legally required receipt make the problem worse by producing paper that customers almost always ignore. And those are just the receipts, etc., that are issued over the run-up to Christmas.

Factor in to that the estimated 150 million supermarket and convenience store transactions every week, and a couple of feet soon turns into thousands of miles.

In extreme cases, a customer can sometimes leave a store with:

• Till receipt

• Separate bank card receipt

• Money saving offers

• "You saved… compared to our competitors" promotions

• Loyalty vouchers to collect

While the receipt itself is a (legal) requirement, it is the reams of promotional material to which we should object, leaving customers walking away with armfuls of ticker tape that they often bin, along with their carrier bags.

Those estimated 150 million weekly grocery transactions equate to:

• 26,000 miles of paper, more than enough to reach around the world's 24,000 circumference

• 270 tons of paper, most of which is discarded rather than recycled because, as indicated already above, some of the paper is mostly non-recyclable

• A year's worth of till receipts would reach from the moon and back – twice

The frightening thing is that the data is only confined this to grocery stores in the United Kingdom. Add to that other business sectors like DIY warehouses and petrol stations, add in the rest of the world – that weekly till roll is going to wrap the world up like a gift bow, and that's not a good thing.

© 2017

Why I don't celebrate Christmas

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The first reason for me not celebrating this “holiday” called Christmas, aside from the fact that I never did due to being of a different belief system to Christianity, is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the birth of Yeshuah bin Miriam, referred to as Jesus, the Christ.

The birth of Christ did not happen on December 25th; that was the birth of the Sun in the Mithraic religion and from this it was imported into the “church” created by the Roman Emperor Constantine and merged with the revelry of Saturnalia. And today it has degenerated to a consumerist event beyond proportions.

As far as I am concerned this is the season of the regeneration of the year when the sun and thus the year gets reborn and progresses into the New Year.

While the giving of gifts has been part of many traditions of the Yuletide it was always one gift and always those were handmade and not multitude of gifts that were made in a factory.

Christmas has become an orgy of spending and it is not one gift and handmade but it “has” to be as many as possible and they all have to be as expensive as at all possible to express our love and appreciation for someone. We seem to have gone totally insane.

And government attached value to this spending as well as we are supposed to help buy the economy out of recession and all that. Sorry, but I refuse to do that as it does not work and only puts more and more profits into the pockets of the greedy capitalist corporations.

Never having been part of the Christmas madness or the celebration of Christmas per se, as for us, when I was a child, the end of the Yuletide, New Year's Day was the day of the gifts as it marked the end, much like it was done in the Soviet Union, with Grandfather Frost and the Ice Maiden being the bringers, of Yule and the new beginning.

Yule marks the rebirth of the sun and it is a potent symbol of death and rebirth – going from the darkness into the light again. Yuletide starts before the Solstice and continues on until New Year ’s Day and this is a “celebration” that makes sense to me.

As to so-called Christmas, the birth of Jesus did not happen in Midwinter and thus is wrong if we come from the Christian perspective, and it would appear that someone wanted it to coincide, sort of, with the Jewish Chanukah, and then they added some new bits from an Eastern religion to it, combined that with various aspects of European Paganism and stirred heavily.

So the celebration of Midwinter and Yuletide makes much more sense as it comes, if done the way is should be, without the madness of consumerism and the expensive gifts “Made in China”, as they most are, nowadays, that nearly need a mortgage to pay for them.

Let's bring some quiet into the madness of the world again with a Midwinter celebration that does not venerate the god of money but that venerates the Earth and its cycles.

So, on that note I wish you a happy Yuletide and some peace and quiet to be renewed, just like the sun, for a new year.

© 2014

The Christmas Tree

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

It is, once again, the time of year where young spruce and fir trees are being sacrificed on the altar of the festival of Saturnalia disguised as a Christian feast by being cut down and then placed for a couple of days in the living room or such, basically, to die.

I will not engage here in the discussion as to real tree vs. fake one. As far as I am concerned it is a no tree event. A fake tree has a very large environmental footprint in production and shipping and killing a real tree just in order to put it on display decked with tinsel, lights and all that jazz is, in my opinion, not a good idea.

But, millions upon millions of little trees – and not so little ones even – are being slaughtered at this time of year for people to do just that and they pay quite a bit of money for this “tradition” as well. Money, that I am sure, could be put to much better uses for more important things.

The tradition of the tree, first of all, has nothing to do with Christ and neither has the date, but that is neither here nor there except for the fact that it is the destruction of a living thing, as far as the real tree is concerned, simply for our dubious pleasure.

If you want to bring Nature indoors for this feast then do so by using branches from evergreen trees, ideally fallen in high winds, and pruning cuttings from the likes of holly (Ilex ilex) but do not sacrifice a living tree for this.

The tree you are killing could, in time to come, become a tree from, at the fullness of its life, your next notebook be made from or book for reading pleasure rather than expiring after a few days in your living room.

The most amazing part of this all is, in my experience, that there are many people who are vehemently opposed to woodland management for instance or to the use of paper for documents and such, who will, without giving it a second thought, it would seem, go out and buy a young spruce or fir that has been sacrificed and put it into their living room.

Unless it is potted a tree has no place in the house and especially not dressed up tradition or no tradition.

© 2013