RETHINKING GIFT-GIVING Products that consume us add to climate catastrophe

big reports came out last month: One, from the National Retail Federation, said holiday shopping sales are up almost 40 percent over last year. The other, the National Climate Assessment, said the world is ending.

Clearly, all those Instant Pots and pine-cone-shaped throw pillows are leading us to the apocalypse. Our stuff is killing us! All that synthetic junk — and the pollution that results from making and disposing of it — will be the death of us. And yet we relentlessly seek more of it. Why? Why are we so obsessed with accumulating stuff ? How many 50 percent-off sales are enough?

Stuff has been on my mind a lot lately, even before the recent onslaught of climate change reports.

In September, my siblings and I had to clear out our parents’ home of almost 60 years. They were not hoarders, and their house is not big. But, my God, the stuff. So much stuff.

It was an archaeological journey into middle-class, midcentury suburbia. An entire closet was stocked with neatly ironed and folded tablecloths, place mats, matching cloth napkins, several sets of napkin rings and candlesticks for all occasions. Wooden coasters. Gump’s salt-and-pepper shakers. A modernist cream-and-sugar set. That would be the “entertaining” closet.

Another closet was devoted almost entirely to slides. My father — a notorious fussbudget — had used his Dymo Label Maker to organize more than 100 slide trays.

“Samuel P. Taylor camping trip, June 1959.”

“Michael’s confirmation, St. Sylvester’s, 1968.” “Thanksgiving, Redding, 1977.” (Labels aside, most of the slides are of the dog.)

The memorabilia didn’t stop there — there were dozens of photo albums with half of the pictures missing, unidentified or falling out; boxes of old letters and preschool artwork and Girl Scout badges; and Shasta High yearbooks from the mid-1940s featuring my mother as a cheerleader.

What to do with all this ephemera? I don’t know! We are prisoners of our stuff. As we emptied our parents’ house, my brother kept throwing everything in the dumpster as my sister simultaneously pulled everything out. I kept loading my car with keepsakes but then emptying it, and reloading it. And then emptying. We never did figure it out.

But the torment of sorting these artifacts paled when we started excavating the kitchen.

Let me remind you, dear reader: My parents’ home was not cluttered. My dad was actually a fastidious minimalist. No one would walk into their house and think, Geez, what a mess! But 58 years in one house, amid postwar consumer bounty, and stuff tends to accumulate.

First, there were the glasses. My parents were of a generation that believed every beverage should have its own glassware. There were complete sets of highball glasses, shot glasses, juice glasses, wine glasses, Champagne glasses, Martini glasses, Scotch-and-soda glasses, Bloody Mary glasses, coffee cups, teacups, hot-buttered-rum cups, brandy snifters, and little ceramic teddy bear cups for babies.

At one point I opened a dusty box above the refrigerator and discovered two dozen delicate little white cups engraved with a gold cursive J, all nestled neatly in individual tissue-papered compartments. I was baffled. What on Earth could these be? J for Jones? Then it came to me: I was gazing at a wedding present that was never opened. From 1952.

The rest of the kitchen was like a bottomless top hat in a kids’ magic show. We kept emptying cupboards, but more old cans of mandarin oranges kept appearing. And cake slicers. And fondue pots.

After a few days of this, I couldn’t bear to look at any of it. I had come around to my brother’s way of thinking: Toss it all. The world is suffocating in stuff. Let these emblems of 20th century family life be ground into the landfill, become one with Mother Earth and, in a few millennia, give rise to new life — a forest, a rose, a new set of highball glasses.

But then, in a spasm of grief, I decided to keep a few carloads of midcentury totems and toss out my current stuff, which was all from thrift stores anyway — remnants from some other family’s purging. It was a great transferring of stuff that culminated in my house becoming a shrine to my mother’s knickTwo

knacks. Anyone who knew my mom is welcome to come over and experience 1960s suburbia in all its Danish-modern glory — before my own kids toss it in the dumpster.

As we enter the high season of retail, I can’t help but look at all these people buying Santa lamps and K-cup pod coffee makers and think, “Do you realize your loved ones will be left with this rubbish after you’ve passed on to your reward? Do you understand that every item you see in the store — and everything in your house — will sooner or later end up in the dump? Even the good stuff ?”

My advice to holiday shoppers is skip the mall. No Amazon shopping binges. Don’t even look at Walmart. Don’t purchase a single item. If you feel obligated to put something under the tree, buy some candy or concert tickets. If there’s something you need — a toaster, say — get it at Goodwill. You might see my parents’ toaster there. It’s old, but it works.

I see two big upsides to this. The first is: If everyone stopped shopping, maybe big-box retail will go out of business and all their stores will get torn down. Imagine a world without Walmart or Target! Every downtown in America would be revitalized. Instead of sprawling mudbrown stores on the outskirts of town, we’d have fields of wildflowers and groves of oak trees. We might save the planet!

The other upside is that, when we die, we’ll spare our families from gutwrenching decisions about what to do with our 10 salad bowls. That’s because we’ll only have one salad bowl. It’ll be Pyrex, it’ll be turquoise, and it’ll be from 1962. So pour yourself a highball and enjoy!

Carolyn Jones is a freelance writer in the East Bay. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.