Posted by Snow in 
This wheelbarrow sacrifices rain catchment
Is your budget thin this year for Christmas gift giving and holiday cheer?
Gift exchanges are a cemented part and parcel of the consumative volcano that is the Western holiday season. And it’s too bad, because the mountains of wrapped gifts that have now long vanished into our pasts are living on in some landfill, with the rolls of ruined sticky tape and polyester nylon bows and ribbons we enjoyed for a brief glimpse of time.
All that foil and all that glitter has a cost. And that is the cost before you take into account the national waistline.
Less excess, green technology, sustainable gifts, and consumer waste at Christmas time is like a diet. It feels thin but it is really good for us. The reason we feel deprived is because the habits of a lifetime of extra gifts, the custom of gift exchange, and consumer retail advertising and past decades of overspending remain strong in our collective memory.
Westerners should question why they only value the holidays with the densely packed accompaniment of oversaturation of food, alcohol, sweets, entertainment and the receipt of goods.
The summer vegetables were now worth their weight in gold. Canning your own produce is one way to meet this demand in the dead cold of winter. The grocery store chain was happenstance open one day, the next not. Power outages, inability of staff to get safely to work, and the unpredictability of how much worse the weather would get kept stores closed.
The unimaginative reality of being confronted with a fifteen minutes to closing deadline with rows and rows of canned goods could be daunting.
Without these cans and jars from our own garden and those of a few friends, we would have been listless and dehydrated, living on fast food, powder sauce macaroni and oversalted noodle mixes. By the end of a few weeks, the pantry stores had gotten boring. We did enjoy slow food, but this was ridiculous.
A few cans each of sun dried tomatoes, canned peppers, even budget frozen vegetable medleys bought at an incredibly low price saw us through many weeks of weather-enforced home “arrest”.
If you want to have some stunning (and sustainable) gifts to give this Christmas. Get that herb garden going now. If you can’t get winter produce into the winter soup pot by December 25th, give coupons out for fresh herbs, carrots, tomato frisee and radishes when the spring comes.
If you know the right people, they’ll gleefully accept. As everyone knows, enjoying a snack from something someone made for you is ten times better than anything out of a generic label tin can.
Don’t worry if you feel your gift is “old hat”. Nobody is turning fresh fruit and vegetables away. One thing that is the very best of cuisine in every culture shares is freshness and flavor. Pass this enjoyment on to others.
And technically, you’ll be reducing their shopping and cooking burden as well. That’s the way to give green, making life for yourself and others more sustainable on both ends of the equation.
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