Mountains of Holiday Catalogs

“Oh the noise, noise, noise, noise, NOISE!!”

Does the above quote from one of my favorite books “How the Grinch stole Christmas” sound familiar to you? You know, when the Grinch was fed up with all the noise down in who Ville!

Well, that pretty much sums up how I feel about all of the catalogs, catalogs, catalogs, catalogs, CATALOGS that I get this time of the year!

If you are like me and have bought anything on line through a catalog, you know and expect that you are going to get catalogs throughout the year from that company, and many times, from affiliated companies, reminding you of what other wonderful things that they have to offer for you to purchase.

Not only do they send me about a gazillion emails for the same catalogs, but many companies also hit me up with their latest paper catalog about 1 to 4 times a month throughout the year! And now ‘tis the season that I seem to get (and I am not exaggerating here) about 10 paper catalogs in my mail box….Every… Single…Day!

I feel terrible for the poor mail carriers who have to deliver these, not to mention the countless trees who have fallen for this cause!

And while some of these catalogs are from companies that I have ordered from, there are many others that I have never even heard of, can’t correlate how they might even be remotely associated with the other companies, and so, I have no idea how I get on their lists at all!

But, out of curiosity I briefly glance through some of these “new to me” catalogs and find some crazy items for sale. Items I didn’t know existed, and wondered who would ever even purchase some of these things. I mean, who in their right mind would need a $345,000.00 personal robot butler?! I am not kidding, there is actually one of these for sale out there! It seems to me that if you can afford a $345,000.00 robot butler, you can probably afford a living, breathing butler, so I come to the conclusion that someone has a lot of money and not nearly enough to do .

So what to do with the mountains of catalogs that I have accumulated in the last month? Well, I didn’t want to just throw them out, so I tried burning them in the burn barrel, but quickly found out that glossy paper does not burn well, so, until I find a recycling facility to drop them off at, I came up with some creative uses for a few of them. For instance, I found out that if you stack enough of them up, they serve as the perfect height for my nutcracker to sit on high atop my entertainment center, and since no one is as tall as that monster, you would never know that they are stacked up there.

But beyond the annoyance of receiving way too many paper catalogs this time of year, I see a bigger issue with this. With so many electronic means of communicating their products, why are so many companies still killing trees to print these? If I can get creative with how to use some of these paper catalogs, surely, they can come up with some creative solutions to not print so many in the first place! True, I may have to find another item to use for my nutcracker to sit on next year, but I think I could live with that!