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Gifts
That Keep Giving
For
me, the holiday season of gift giving doesn’t start with the
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or congested Black Friday register
lines, but rather with a blank piece of linoleum, some scratch
paper and a pencil.
From these lowly objects, I develop an idea for a holiday
card that I will mail (as in snail) out to over 100 people—family,
friends and others who have made a difference in my life during
the last year. I scratch out a number of ideas on paper, trying
to keep the message simple, joyous and peace-affirming. After
settling on a design and sketching it on the linoleum, I then
use a gouging tool to carve it (in mirror image) into a 4-by-6-inch
rectangle of the flooring material.
Once the linoleum is successfully cut, I convert my dining
room into a print shop. I spread newspapers out over the wooden
table in the middle of the room and clear spaces on the nearby
piano and shelves for lining up cards to dry. I use an old
paper cutter to cut pieces of textured recycled paper to the
card size desired and fold them. I squeeze water-based block
printing ink on the slick pages of one of the innumerable
catalogues of useless objects that fill my mailbox at this
time of year and roll my brayer through the ink. With a thin
coating of ink on the brayer, I then roll it across the surface
of the linoleum and press a piece of the prepared paper against
the inked surface. After rubbing the paper vigorously against
the linoleum with my fingers, I peel it back and presto—a
handmade holiday card. The nature of this printing process
makes each piece unique.
I’ve been making cards this way for over 25 years and my adult
kids still come by to help with the production. It’s a tradition
that I think gets back to some of the basics of the holiday
season that predate the mass-marketing and shop-till-you-drop
mentality that’s now so pervasive.
’Tis
the season for gift giving. We exchange gifts with friends
and family, reinforcing the bonds between us. Unfortunately,
for many it is also the season for accumulating more personal
debt and useless junk. Billions of dollars of goods are exchanged,
with much of this paid for through credit. According to credit-tracking
organizations, the average U.S. household is currently treading
water with $8,000-$9,000 of credit-card debt. Credit-card
abuse has become a widespread addictive behavior of epidemic
proportions in this country.
For the national economy, the gift-giving holidays provide
a major year-end sales spike. No doubt George W. will be out
rallying Americans to get further into debt in order to lift
the mired economy, show their patriotic zeal and enhance his
re-election prospects. With the Bureau of the National Debt
reporting a record $6.9 trillion national debt, which is increasing
at the rate of $2.64 billion a day, George W. seems to be
the perfect poster boy for debt. Resist the temptation!
Good gifting involves planning and thought: Make a list of
those persons you plan to give gifts to, the kinds of things
you’d like to get for each and the amount of money you have
to spend. I make such a list each year and update it as I
go along, noting what I end up getting for each person. I
try to focus on gifts that are energy efficient, environmentally
benign, and fairly traded. Thinking along these lines has
led me to a number of gifting ideas. Here are a few:
One of the best energy-efficiency gifts I’ve found is the
compact fluorescent light bulb. This gift reduces energy bills,
cuts greenhouse gas emissions and provides a more efficient
household light. It’s a gift that keeps giving and has benefits
for more than just the receiver of the gift. You can check
out a range of bulb options at Real Goods (www.realgoods.com),
though some brands and types are carried by local hardware
stores.
Another area that I’ve found works well for gifting is food.
Giving food allows you to introduce people to new items that
are nutritious and perhaps produced with less environmental
damage. The Honest Weight Food Co-op (484 Central Ave., Albany)
provides a wide range of highly nutritious and organic foods
as well as environmentally enlightened personal-care products.
They also carry fair-trade and shade-grown coffees, which
see more of the price paid going back to their growers—who
use agricultural methods that result in less environmental
damage.
I’ve found that the best place in the area for fair-traded
crafts from cultures around the world is the Ten Thousand
Villages store in Stuyvesant Plaza. The store’s mission is
a “fair income to Third World people by marketing their handicrafts
and telling their stories in North America.” Buying gifts
here makes more of the price you pay end up in the hands of
the craftspeople who produced them than in other stores.
Used books are another well-received gift I’ve given over
the years. Dove and Hudson Old Books and the Lark Street Book
Shop (215 Lark St.) are two regular Albany gifting stops on
my list. Fine recycled books cost a fraction of their original
price and they read just as well as new expensive ones while
supporting important homegrown community-involved businesses.
If you want to formally opt out of the gift exchange ritual
all together and make it a buy-nothing holiday, check out
www.simpleliving.net. There you can print out Holiday Gift
Exemption Vouchers that allow you and your gift exchangers
to enter a written formal agreement not to buy each other
gifts.
With such a large part of the year’s buying taking place during
the next few weeks, the gifts you buy (and don’t buy) can
affect much more than the gratitude of their recipients. Well,
excuse me, I’ve got a few cards to print and get into the
mail.
—Tom
Nattell
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