Welcome to the Mud Room, a joint commentary series of Rumble Strip, Vermont and the Door Yard.

On the week before Christmas, we bring you Buy Nothing Day by Jessamine West welcome.

There's only one holiday I actively celebrate this time of year and that's buy nothing day.

Happens in November the day after Thanksgiving.

Sort of a made-up holiday. Adbusters and Wired made it into an international thing back

in 1992, but it never got the traction of some of the other recent holidays that I consider to be made up,

like Administrative Professional's Day, for example, but to be fair, that has been around since 1952.

And it's probably because you can't really shop for it.

I'm not religious.

I grew up in a small town about the size of Randolph Vermont,

where I live now, and we had a Christmas tree at home but never went to church.

People around here get really Christmassy, which is actually usually fun to be around, but

it doesn't resonate with me personally in a big way as a holiday.

So here's what I do for Buy Nothing Day.

For the entire day, I don't buy anything and I go for a walk outside.

That's it, and I do it every year. I got the idea for the

walk outside part of it from Bill McKibbin's first book, The Age of Missing

Information, which he wrote in 1992.

You probably know McKibbin. He's the guy behind 350.org.

He's an earnest sensible Vermonter from Ripton

concerned about climate change and other things that are maybe ruining the world.

This was back in the earlier days of cable television and the endless ruminating on what would

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