Being Intentional with Your Gifts This Holiday Season

The holidays are a special time of the year and buying presents for our loved ones is one of the ways we show our friends and family how much they mean to us. However, as the years have gone by, holiday spending has snowballed out of control and gift-giving has become stressful, performative, and overwhelmingly expensive. In 2020, Americans spent $777 billion on holiday shopping alone, and by 2021 we spent approximately $859 billion during the holiday season. What will that number be this year in 2022? 

Here at Mikoleon, our focus is on quality rather than quantity, and we have a company goal of being intentional with our holiday shopping this year. What does shopping intentionally mean? To us, shopping intentionally is a holistic term for being thoughtful and conscious as we make purchases, and choosing products that make a positive impact. This year, we’re choosing to be intentional about sustainability. Intentional about overconsumption. Intentional about our carbon footprint. Intentional about the materials and chemicals our purchases are made of. Intentional about our environmental and ecological impact. Intentional about the workers who make and ship our products. 

We’d like to share our challenge to shop intentionally this holiday season: to buy and give high-quality gifts that contribute positively to the greater good of our beautiful world!

To inspire you, we’ve collected a few thoughts and ideas about how to shop intentionally this holiday season. (Hint: it’s easier than you think!)

Small Businesses

When you buy from a small business, you’re buying from a real person. There are many ways to “shop small” and support owners of small and growing businesses. The holiday season is a great time to find local craft fairs and bazaars that showcase small businesses in your area, and you can find beautiful, one-of-a-kind, handmade goods that make perfectly unique gifts. Use the Search feature on Instagram to look through small business hashtags, such as #supportsmallbusinesses, #smallbusinessowner,  #shopsmall, #shoplocal, #handmade, or #entrepreneur to find small businesses to buy from. There are plenty of ways to find small, sustainable businesses that could use your business.

Mikoleón Local Store  

Materials and Practices

Taking the time to shop for presents that support a positive world impact is a small but meaningful way that you can make an intentional difference this year. Look for businesses that use fair trade, sustainable, or eco-friendly materials to make their products. Buy clothes that don’t support the fast fashion industry and use clean labor. It may seem like a daunting task to find businesses that are run in beneficial, intentional ways, but there is a growing number of business owners who are striving to make a positive change! For example, Mikoleon uses sustainably sourced full-grain leather that is handcrafted by Guatemalan artisans and delivered to our customers with only the finest slow fashion business practices!

Artisan

Consumerism

Buying gifts isn’t a bad thing – it helps our economy and supports business owners! However, shopping intentionally means being aware of overconsumption and wastefulness. We can combat negative consumerism this holiday season by:

• Not buying more gifts than needed
• Not buying gifts that will be disposed of quickly
• Not panic-buying
• Not buying at the last minute
• Not supporting harmful sales, like Black Friday (which we explained here!) 
• Not buying unsustainable products

Heirloom Boots

Beauty Products

Skincare, makeup, haircare, and other beauty products are a popular gift during holidays for good reason, but there are certainly ways that you can give the gift of beauty while still shopping intentionally. Some of our ideas for using intentionality in our beauty gifts include choosing vegan and cruelty-free products that don’t test on animals and looking for reusable and recyclable packing such as glass, aluminum, and biodegradable plastic. Youth-promoting facial sunscreens and makeup that includes SPF are all the rage this year, but consider buying mineral SPF products that are “reef safe” and don’t contain the ingredients oxybenzone and octinoxate, which have been proven to be harmful to fish and coral reefs.

Heirloom Boots Rose Gold

Diversity

There are so many wonderful businesses run by all types of people, and taking the time to be intentional about who you’re buying from is vital for boosting local economies, closing the racial and gender wage gap, fostering job creation, and making specialized products for women and minorities more widely available. Look for gifts from shops owned and operated by POCs to support racial diversity. Businesses owned by women are another stellar place to be intentional about your holiday purchases to encourage equality and equity. Researching the people you’re supporting when you buy gifts from their businesses is a small – but meaningful – way to give back this holiday season. (Hint: Mikoleon is a small business where you can support women and POCs including skilled Guatemalan artisans!)

Make a Donation 

If you’re still stumped or the holidays crept up on you and you need to buy a last-minute gift but want to do so with intentionality, we invite you to make a donation to a reputable charity organization in lieu of a physical gift. There is an endless supply of amazing charity institutions that will use any size of donation, big or small, to make the world a better place. Donate to a local charity to make a difference in your own neighborhood, or support a well-established, large-scale international organization with a great reputation. The gift of charity is timeless, purposeful, and always intentional.

Dressember x Mikoleón

Finally, we invite you to take a look at our 2022 holiday gift guide to get some ideas for gifts that are not only holiday must-haves, but also perfectly intentional crowd-pleasers. Happy holidays and happy shopping!

 Accessories