Counterculture Holiday Ideas

Why sell out for the holidays? Here are a few holiday ideas that might actually help cultivate peace on earth and good will to all. Most of these are ideas that we have picked up somewhere along the way and use in our family holday celebrations. If you have any ideas, pass them along.

Gifts:

• Buy locally made goods. You can find local products at farmers' markets. Look around on your daily travels; you'll probably find more local stuff than you think.
• Buy second hand. Reduce your impact on the use of natural resources for manufacturing new products. Books, CDs, video games, electronics, clothes, toys, and athletic equipment can all be easily found second hand. If you can't find it in a local shop, try e-bay.
• Buy fair-trade products. Check out Ten Thousand Villages. They have locations nearby in Mechanicsburg and Hagerstown. They carry beautiful handmade products from around the world for which the artisans are paid a fair wage.
• Set a limit for your holiday spending. Your friends and family don't want you to go into debt buying presents for them.
• Be creative with gift-giving. Some gifts don't cost anything but have a lot of value: a night of babysitting, a home-cooked meal, a massage, mowing the lawn, a poem, a tai chi or yoga lesson. We all have something to give.
• For the person who has everything, give a charitable donation on their behalf.
• As a gift to yourself and your community, find an organization that is important to you and volunteer.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

• Don't forget about regifting! That brand new picture frame that your coworker gave you last year that doesn't match your decor might be perfect in someone else's home.
• Save and re-use that wrapping paper. Yeah, sometimes it's more fun to just tear into a gift, but sometimes it's OK to take your time and carefully unwrap a present. Think of it as savouring the joy of unwrapping the gift. Really though, we rarely have to buy wrapping paper, because we're able to reuse so much of it.
• Be creative with wrapping gifts. We have used colorful newspaper; it has a very chic, green look. We have covered gift boxes in the previous years' Christmas cards. Any other ideas?
• String-up popcorn and cranberries instead of lights (electricity = coal-fired power plants = no more North Pole for Santa's reindeer or the polar bears).
• Save clean pieces of aluminum foil that are too small to use for anything. Fold them into homemade tinsel/icecicles. I'll post a picture if I have time.
• Get a Christmas tree with the roots balled and plant it after the season is over.
• If you use a cut tree make sure that it is chipped for mulch or used as wildlife shelter and not landfilled.
• Consider how much packaging comes with gifts and where that packaging will end up. Look for alternatives with less packaging.
• Look into solar-powered Christmas lights as an alternative to the conventional.

Local Feast!

• Don't forget to get your turkey and holiday fixin's locally.

Finally, celebrate your holiday traditions with friends and family. Beneath the commercial, plastic surface of the holiday are ideas and traditions worth sharing.

That's it for now. I'll post more ideas later, if I think of more. If you have ideas of your own or would like to comment on these please post a comment.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday.

The Coffee Conundrum

I love coffee, and I've found coffee to be an interesting subject for contemplation. Who grows my coffee? What does a coffee bush look like? Where are Sumatra, the Rift Valley, and Torajaland? Do the farmers make a decent wage? What kind of impact do the farms have on the local ecosystem?

Unfortunately, the answers to some of my questions led me to give up coffee. There are a lot of problems surrounding the treatment of workers on coffee plantations, and many plantations contribute to significant environmental problems like deforestation, the decline of migratory songbird populations, and a loss of biodiversity.

I tried first buying only organic, fair-trade coffee. These coffees came closest to meeting my desire to have a cup of joe that was socially and environmentally responsible. Fair trade basically means that the farmers who grow the coffee get a reasonable price for their crop. We all know what organic means, but in many cases it also means that the farmers grow their coffee in the shade of taller trees. This practice provides shelter for migratory birds, firewood for the farmers, fruit for the farmers' tables, and greater biodiversity. Here are a few places I found to get fair-trade, organic coffees:
the Giant Grocery store on Wayne Ave. in Chambersburg, PA.
Ten Thousand Villages http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/home.php They have many locations, but I used to go to the one in Mechanicsburg.
and my favorite local coffee shop Greencastle Coffee Roasters. http://www.greencastlecoffee.com/ They have an incredible selection of teas and coffees including a couple fair-trade, organic coffees.

After some time, I began to place a higher value on locally produced food and could no longer justify paying the higher price for the fair-trade, organic coffees. That was when I decided to give up coffee. I still have a cup occasionally with desert or with friends, but my regular morning coffee is gone. I had headaches one or two days. I felt a little sluggish in the mornings, but, in a matter of days, I found I functioned just as well without my coffee.

Here's a link to an article that goes into greater detail about the coffee conundrum and offers some additional resources: http://www.nrdc.org/thisgreenlife/0410.asp.