Frankincense, myrrh, and a silver-plated used teabag receptacle

There was a brilliant article in the Guardian by George Monbiot this morning: on the twelfth day of Christmas your gift will just be junk. Worth a look; it's in the environment section.
It lead me to a Youtube film by Annie Leonard, a sensible American woman who has spent ten years researching the chain of events involved in making 'stuff'. I've put it on my post-materialism blog if you'd like to look at it. It's worth extracting twenty minutes of one's busy life to do so.
Why I was so pleased to find this eloquent rant was that sometimes I just feel alone in my own internal and external rantings about 'stuff'. I know I'm not, but well, I just do sometimes.
Here's a lovely picture of Tesco's with it's rakish little party hat on. I think I blogged about them last time I went to the UK, but the hat just made me want to lie down and scream. The forced cosy jollification of it . . .
I had to go in this particular branch to buy Mum some vests as it was near the home, and I suddenly had a very tiny notion of what it must be like to experience agoraphobia and claustrophobia all at the same time. Festivephobia perhaps.
Father Christmas was closing in on me, 'Wizards', I wish it could be Christmas everyday, was a pounding sea in my ears, and people were buying turkeys manically even though it was only December the third. There were no vests that I could see, or at least no normal white ones, only glittery party wear and festive 'onesies'.
On another 'vest quest' the next day, I foraged in BHS. A happier result and I stood in the queue listening to people discussing whether they had got their decorations sorted out. I felt the room closing in on me again. I could see, all around me racks of cheap jewellery, sale prices, even though it was a month to go before The Sales. Hello . . . no one really wants this stuff; or at least, no one needs it. On the other side of the till were vast displays of merchandise to be bought on a festive whim to then be discarded in the first boot sale of the year in a freezing field - huge teddy-shaped biscuit barrels, giant happy china depictions of the 'liquorice all-sorts' man; metre long packets of Jaffa cakes, celebrity calendars, knock-off perfume, Star Wars shower gel. . . I escaped with my two beige vests, went for a walk on the promenade at Sandbanks and looked at gulls, sea, sand and people walking not shopping.