Green Christmas!

This picture demonstrates the ways we did christmas this year. What a great success! I feel proud that my badgering the family about it has yielded a more sustainable use of resources to celebrate the holiday!

There are:
wood items that my brother and I made,
a book by a local author, and CD's of local musicians (an interesting twist on buying local),
an organic T-shirt,
cloth bags that gifts were wrapped in to save on paper waste,
Vermont socks (darn tough brand),
local fudge,
a plate made of sugar maple in Vermont,
a set of reusable bags that replace the plastic bags, for grocery shopping, but they are also good for buying bulk because they function similar to plastic, and become air tight when wet.
and a few other wonderful items.

The majority of the gifts were in this vein and I'm proud of my family for that. I think it'll only get better with time.

This holiday was a great source of satisfaction for me, but it also taught me an important lesson about local economy. The paradigm that the Green Christmas is based on is that as consumers we can vote at the cash register. The things we pay for are sustained while the things we don't buy will dwindle or disappear. It's boycott theory I guess.

The idea of buying local makes a leap from this basic premise to say that supporting a local economy is good for the environment. I am not going to question that too much, but it's worth noting that these things aren't absolute, sometimes a centralized system is better environmentally than many smaller systems.

Overall though, small local systems are far more sustainable than a global economy. That being said, what part of the local economy are we supporting when we buy lots of gift type items around the holidays? So who are we voting for at the cash register now? GIFT MAKERS! musicians, soap people, scarf weavers, and the like. How far does that really go to promote sustainability? It's a start. And even just thinking about it is a start, but if you care enough about it to make it a green christmas, you should keep your pantry and your fridge green too! If Vermont is ever going to secede from the union we'll need grains, meats, and fruit a lot more than we'll need silk scarves. A local economy needs all levels, just like the global economy, the people who often win in Montpelier are the artisans, because there is a lot of money in Montpelier and a lot of tourism. And that's fine, because artisans are great, but don't forget about farmers. NEVER forget about farmers!