Monthly Archives: November 2008

Think of all the gifts you have received on your birthday over the years.  How many of them are things you actually need?  Over a lifetime, that’s a lot of stuff!

Grant and I both had birthday’s in October.  We started dropping hints to family and friends about waste-free, commercial-free gifts a few weeks in advance, and they came through with flying colours.  We were given homemade cards and preserves and cupcakes, personal drawings, music, lovely soap, and garden plants (including a lingonberry bush that will hopefully supply us with jam next year).  All thoughtfully wrapped in re-used paper or fabric including a card made out of the end of a cracker box.  We got tickets to an event, friendly long-distance phone calls, a day spent zip-lining, and a night at a hotel on our next vacation.  Not to mention the promise by Grant’s dad never to use plastic shopping bags again.  They’re all things that we really value and that will never end up in the landfill. Continue reading →

In this household, we love halloween.  It also happens to be my birthday.  You know what this means: I’ve had a dress-up party every birthday of my life.

Since we started trying to live a consumer-free, waste-free lifestyle, halloween has been looming like a dark cloud.  What could we possibly wear?  What kind of candy could we give out?

The past few years, Grant and I have put together some serious costumes- some more elaborate than others, but most involving glue guns, material, cardboard, duct tape, and numerous cans of spray paint.  But this year was different.  We weren’t allowed to buy anything, plus we didn’t want to generate any new garbage from supplies we might have had in the house.  Add to that the fact that we had been strapped for time the past couple weeks (ie no time for paper mache), and halloween was starting to look pretty sad. Continue reading →