Well, the whole not acquiring stuff thing. That didn’t work.
I spent the afternoon at a work sponsored volunteer thing, sorting presents for the Salvos. I was, as Greg named it this morning, the “sacrificial volunteer”. The larger company I work for had arranged to have a company volunteer afternoon at the warehouse, and someone decided it would be a nice gesture if one person from each department was there. So, I answered the phone the day HR was looking for volunteers and was duly press ganged into it. I gather other departments actually had an option to volunteer, but the email never went round my little team. I am not complaining, just noting. And as I left, one of my co-workers mentioned she would like to have done this. Sigh.
So, we were dealing with the donated toys that people bring in to the wishing trees at Kmart and the like, and that are collected by workplaces (including mine). Now, I was aware that it is good not to wrap the gift, because they do all get unwrapped at the warehouse and sorted. Kind of sad, because some people clearly go to some effort to wrap the gifts and write little cards, but there are good reasons.
People sometimes donate junk. Really unusable stuff, or old stuff. These are meant to be new toys, not the garbage at the bottom of the closet. So the junk has to be weeded out. Then the inappropriate. This is the salvation army so nothing that promotes gambling (so much for the roulette set) or violence (no plastic handguns). And no food with alcoholic flavoring.
So all of that gets weeded out. Then the rest gets sorted into age and gender related piles. Because it is so close to Christmas most of the specific gifts, those that will be given out to kids this Christmas have been sorted and organised. What we were doing is packing gifts into boxes for next Christmas. So a variety of the boxes will be shipped to various bush towns for their Christmas processes next year. It does make sense, it can take a long time to ship stuff, and this ensures that regional areas, which may have a lot of need, have it available next year and are not dependent on gifts from their area alone.
It is nice to see how many people do donate stuff,and how much thought goes into some of the donations. I note that a lot of stuff for girls is violently pink, and a large majority of the boys stuff is cars and trucks. Next year I will keep this in mind and try to buy something different for my donated toys.
It also gave me the opportunity to observe some toy trends. One of the toy companies has been especially enterprising, and has reissued a number of old standards with toy story decoration. Toy story Trouble, toy story twister, toy story board games. Kind of clever, but a bit sad at the same time- the only way to make it appealing is slap Buzz and Woody on everything.
Barbie has gotten a little racier than she used to be, and comes in some very weird guises (green alien fashion fantasy?).
And apparently one of THE gifts this year is Nerf bullet guns. Well, not being passed on this year, and unlike some of the other stuff that is rejected for Christmas, it won’t be sold in the volunteer shops. The working volunteers are free to take these home (for a donation). So I now have some nerf guns. So much for not acquiring stuff.
Edit: I should add it was quite an enjoyable afternoon, and I was glad I did it.