Why you should stop buying Hallmark and celebrate every day
How great does it feel to give or receive a gift? But yet people are told to wait for February 14th to showcase love, dedicate one day a year to celebrate someone, and wait until the end of the year to give thoughtful gifts to strangers.
I’ve been working in marketing/advertising for 7+ years now and had my fair share with holiday campaigns. Every chocolate brand wants to own Easter, every lingerie brand wants to dominate Valentine’s, and every jewelry brand claims they have ‘everything to make her love you’ around Christmas.
There are two big problems with holidays today — they’re controlled by brands who just want your money, and, therefore, cause people to have high expectations for gifts and levels of appreciation around these times.
No one is saying we should celebrate every day because there’s no revenue in that. However, by eliminating waiting and instead celebrate the micro achievements we have each day, we can transform the way we feel. Spending time with loved ones and showing your appreciation is full of good feelings, don’t you wish they can happen more often? But by waiting for these specific days creates less importance to show appreciation on any other day.
The concept of holidays
If we look at the history of holidays, from why they started to what they are today, well does anyone even know the origins of these holidays anymore? Humanity has always recorded days of significance and meaning to celebrate them. But today, there are more “holidays” than ever before. You’re told to buy waffles on Waffle Day, treat your dogs on International Dog Day, buy, buy, buy, and brands make deals on these days to entice you to do so even more. If you start to pay attention, this will become so evident to you.
Unfortunately, this isn’t anything new, holidays have been dominated and created by brands and marketers for as long as we know. It’s all a marketing-generated, revenue-boosting scam. “Singles Day”, for example, is a huge shopping day, promoted for single people to splurge on themselves to make them feel better. Many e-commerce stores are generating large revenues on this day, but one store in particular, Alibaba, makes *billions $$* in sales that day every year. Who do you think made Singles Day a thing?
The unfortunate outcome
There’s an unfortunate outcome of what we’ve been told to do as a society — to wait for certain days to show appreciation. Holidays are essentially just an illusion, and my goal is to help people turn every day into a day worth celebrating.
You don’t need a specific day to hear you’re a great person, you’re loved, and you deserve gratitude. And you shouldn’t wait until a specific day to show someone how you feel about them. If you only wait until their birthday, Valentine’s day, etc., to show your appreciation, then you are only doing what you are told to do.
Life is hard, and as many of us have been recently experiencing, we go through countless of emotions every day. Sometimes just getting out of bed is an accomplishment for some people. There is an alarming amount of mental health issues that people are now dealing with. By focusing your attention on celebrating a victory every day, no matter how small or big, you will start to see how much appreciation (for you or someone else) can make a difference in your life.
Below is a quote on the concept of waiting from Eckhart Tolle in his book “The Power of Now”, which I highly recommend reading, and here is a great read that speaks to how living every day helps improve overall well-being.
“‘Large-scale waiting’ is waiting for the next vacation, for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be important, to become enlightened. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.
Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don’t want the present. You don’t want what you’ve got, and you want you haven’t got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don’t want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.”
Everyday Greets
Introducing Everyday Greets, a platform to help remind people to stop waiting for days to show appreciation, and that every day should be treated as a gift.
The initiative was to celebrate daily victories, big or small, you can give to yourself and/or others, instead of waiting for specific days that only come once a year. Together we can start celebrating more precious moments and see more opportunities to show appreciation and love to ourselves and each other.
If people continue to buy what they’re told to buy around holidays, brands and marketers will continue to scam. Let’s change our perceptions around holidays and focus on the root of it all.
To be clear — I don’t believe in demolishing holidays all together, they will always be necessary. What I’m actually saying is that we should have more holidays, but on our own schedule. Imagine making your own holiday calendar for the year, and you choose what you want to celebrate and what you don’t. Can you fill in 365 days of the year?
Let’s make this world a more appreciated place.
I invite you to follow Everyday Greets if you stand with the belief that everyone deserves to be celebrated more than once a year. If you have an interesting idea in line with Everyday Greets, or you’d like to work together, please send me a note: sarabudhwani@gmail.com.