Recipe of the month: Winter squash and eggplant curry

On our last trip to H-Mart, Brian succumbed, as usual, to the siren song of cheap eggplant. (The skinny Chinese eggplants are frequently on sale for less than a dollar a pound, and Brian just can't resist them.) His original plan was to make it into bangan bartha, part of our standard recipe rotation. However, when I mentioned that we still needed a Recipe of the Month for December (and didn't have much time to make it, since we'd be spending Christmas week with the in-laws in Indiana), he decided to hunt around for a new eggplant recipe instead. He hit upon this Oven-Roasted Eggplant and Butternut Squash Curry recipe on Food.com, and since we already had a full year's harvest of butternut squash stored away, he thought it looked like a perfect choice. The only ingredient it called for that we didn't have were scallions (which he didn't think it really needed, since it contains onion already) and fresh cilantro (which I don't care for anyway, so he had no problem leaving it out).

However, there was one other snag: the recipe as written was somewhat complicated. It calls for you to wrap the whole eggplant and squash individually in aluminum foil, roast them for an hour and a half, let them cool, peel them, and mash them. Then you have to mix the mashed veggies with the masala (onion, tomato, and spice) mixture, which you've prepared while they were in the oven, and let the whole thing cook for another ten minutes. And when it's all done, you're supposed to serve it  with chappatis, which are not exactly trivial to prepare.

All this rigmarole seemed rather unnecessary to Brian, since he knew that it was perfectly possible—and much faster—to roast eggplant by cutting it into cubes. That's what he normally does when making bartha, and it comes out just fine. So he created a simplified version of the recipe with the eggplant and squash cooked this way and simply mixed into the masala. He also improved on the masala itself by using whole fenugreek seeds, sauteed along with the cumin seeds, rather than ground fenugreek. And where the recipe called for fresh tomatoes, Brian used a combination of fresh and canned—the last two little tomatoes from our 2019 harvest, and enough canned diced tomatoes to make up a cup of volume.

Here's Brian's modified version of the recipe:

Cut into 1/2-inch cubes, coat with 1 Tbsp olive oil, and roast 45 minutes at 450 degrees F:

20 oz. butternut squash

10 oz eggplant

Prepare masala:

2 Tbsp olive oil

2 tsp cumin seeds

20 fenugreek seeds

1 onion, finely chopped

1 c diced tomato

1/2 tsp ground coriander

1/4 tsp turmeric

3/4 tsp salt

Heat the oil on medium-high. Saute the cumin and fenugreek seeds until they become aromatic (about 30 seconds). Add onion and saute for 5 minutes or until soft.  Add tomatoes and saute for another 5 minutes. Add coriander, turmeric, and salt and remove from heat.

When the squash and eggplant are done, combine with masala and serve over rice.

This dish smelled great as it was cooking, with all those fragrant spices popping in the oil and mingling with the smells of pungent onion and tart tomato. When it was finally done and the veggies were mixed in with the masala, it didn't exactly look as great as it smelled, but the taste delivered everything that the aroma had promised. It was warm and spicy, packed with flavor without tasting too overpoweringly of any one ingredient, and the tender texture of the baked eggplant and squash didn't seem to have lost anything from Brian's simplified cooking method. Likewise, the mixture of fresh and canned tomatoes didn't hurt the flavor any, and was probably preferable to supplementing our last two garden tomatoes with one of the pale and mushy "fresh" tomatoes many supermarkets carry in the wintertime. In fact, we're planning to try it again tomorrow, this time with only canned tomatoes, and my guess is the flavor won't suffer at all as a result.

Even with Brian's simplified method, this recipe isn't super fast to make; counting chopping time, it probably takes a good hour from start to finish. But it's pretty easy and pretty cheap, especially if you have all the spices in your cupboard and a source of cheap eggplant like the H-Mart. And it's also both vegan and gluten-free, so you can serve it to pretty much anyone you might be inviting over to dinner.

Which brings me to a question I've been considering for 2020: should the Recipe of the Month become the Vegan Recipe of the Month? When I first started the Veggie of the Month feature back in 2013, my goal was to increase the amount of produce in my diet, and when I discovered that trying a new fruit or veggie each month wasn't the best way to do that, I modified it to be a new produce-centered recipe. But in the past year, my main dietary focus has been less on eating more produce for my own health and more on promoting the health of the planet by avoiding animal products. So should my Recipe of the Month also work toward that goal?

This plan wouldn't be too hard to put into effect. While in Indianapolis, we made our usual annual foray out to Half Price Books, and one of the items I picked up there was a new-to-us vegan cookbook, Conveniently Vegan, which contains lots of simple plant-based dishes for us to try. And my subscription to It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken is dropping new vegan recipes in my inbox twice a week as well. Between these two sources, I've already got a short list of new vegan dishes I want to try, so I should have no problem coming up with a new one each month.

The only downside I can see is that if I stick to 100 percent vegan dishes for these monthly experiments, I could miss out on some wonderful discoveries like the Raspberry Fool I made in July 2018. But on the other hand, that was technically a bonus recipe; I'd already done a Recipe of the Month for July, and it didn't stop me from experimenting further. So I figure, as long as I allow myself to try new dishes that aren't vegan, requiring myself to try at least one new dish each month that is vegan will be a good way to expand our plant-based repertoire and shift our diet gradually closer to our ideal.

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: The Changing of the Garden

I was unable to put this blog entry out on the actual winter solstice, yesterday, because Brian and I spent that day in our car, making our way across parts of five states on our annual winter trek to Indianapolis. But, as usual, we took advantage of this one-on-one time to go through the new Fedco seed catalogue and decide which of our garden crops we wanted to keep, drop, or replace next year.

I thought this conversation would be a pretty short one this year, since most of the crops we've grown this year were pretty successful. Running down the list—arugula, regular basil, Thai basil, cucumbers, dill, two kinds of green beans, leeks, three kinds of lettuce, marigolds, parsley, two kinds of peppers, scallions, snap peas, two kinds of butternut squash, and four kinds of tomatoes—we found that most of them had provided decent yields and given us very little trouble. We found only a few that we thought we'd like to replace, such as the new King Sieg leeks, which produced only a few scrawny specimens. Rather than go back to our previous Lincoln variety, which was never a big producer either, we're taking another stab at finding a better variety—most likely the autumn-producing Lancelot, which is billed as "a dependable heavy-yielding, virus-tolerant bolt-resistant leek." We're keeping both our trusty Carmen peppers and our new Cabellero chilis, but we're dropping the old Jimmy Nardellos (which didn't even give us one healthy seedling) in favor of a new frying pepper, most likely the early-producing Takara Shishito.

Among our tomatoes, we're keeping the Premio for early production, the Pineapple for late-season production, and the Sun Gold for tons of tiny cherry tomatoes all season long. However, we're dropping the other cherry variety, Honeydrop; it was indeed less prone to cracking than the Sun Gold, but not quite as tasty and not nearly as productive. And we're definitely dropping the Heinz paste tomato, which produced only a meager crop of small tomatoes, barely enough for one good batch of sauce. We've identified two candidates for a paste tomato to replace it: Opalka, touted for "copious yields" and ability to withstand hot, dry summers, and Vilms, a massive producer resistant to many tomato diseases. However, given that Heinz is the second or third plum tomato we've tried without success, I'm not getting my hopes up too much.

So I thought those minor changes would be it for next year's garden. Then, however, Brian threw me a curve. He said that next year, he'd like to try adding an entirely new crop to our repertoire: potatoes.

Brian's newfound interest in potatoes was motivated less by a desire to eat them—since, after all, they're readily available and pretty cheap at the supermarket—than by curiosity about how to grow them. He has a coworker who grows potatoes in his garden, and his descriptions of the process piqued Brian's interest. Plus, he says half-jokingly, being able to grow a crop that can actually supply a reasonable amount of our daily calories will come in handy during the global-warming-induced End Times.

However, when I turned to the "Potatoes" section in the Fedco catalog, it looked like we'd hit a snag. I read through the section on potato culture, and the way they described it made it sound like this crop requires a lot more work than most of the veggies we grow. You have to plant at just the right time, when the soil is at 55 to 60 degrees and dry enough to work easily; and earlier or later, and you risk having your seed potatoes rot in the ground. You're supposed to plant them four to six inches deep, then "hill them up" (mounding dirt over the stem, so it can turn into a tuber underground) when they reach 6 inches tall and again at 12 to 15 inches tall. And you have to water them consistently, an inch or so each week. And ideally, you should give them a good coating of mulch after the second hilling to keep them moist and control weeds. And you have to wait two to three weeks after the vines die before harvesting them, and keep them chilly—55 to 60 degrees—for several weeks before putting them into storage in exactly the right conditions: 38 to 40 degrees, 85 to 90 percent humidity, and complete darkness.

But the most serious problem was the amount of space needed. The minimum amount of seed potatoes you can buy from Fedco is two pounds, and according to the catalogue, each pound will fill 5 to 8 "row feet"—so to grow our potatoes in the traditional way, we'd need a minimum of 10 feet, and up to 16 feet, of potato hills. In our tiny square-foot garden, that just wasn't going to be an option.

Fortunately, we'd both heard of other ways to grow potatoes in containers, such as barrels or bags. I pulled out my phone and Googled "grow potatoes small space," and I found several articles about these methods. One, from A Modern Homestead, was very enthusiastic about the "potato tower" method: making a cylinder of chicken wire, lining it with newspaper and mulch, and planting your potatoes in that. The writers claimed this method could produce "hundreds of pounds of potatoes in less than 30 square feet." This seemed a bit iffy to me, given that Fedco said you needed to plant your potatoes at least 8 inches apart for fingerling varieties and 10 to 12 inches apart for full-size ones. However, the Ontario Potato Board was more optimistic, saying you only needed to space the seed potatoes 5 to 7 inches apart. It also said you can use other kinds of containers, such as a burlap bag, a garbage can, or any tall container with drainage holes drilled in the bottom.

Now, as it happens, Brian and I already have some large buckets with drainage holes in them: the ones we used as tree-watering buckets when we first planted our plum trees. According to Instructables, each of these should hold about three potato plants, so with five buckets, we could accommodate fifteen plants, or just about two pounds' worth. We're not going to attempt anything on a bigger scale than that just yet.

As for which variety of potato to grow, Fedco sorted its offerings into four types: early, mid-season, late, and fingerling. We confined our search to the fingerling type, since we've found this type of potato to be both particularly tasty and particularly expensive to buy. Fedco had nine fingerling potatoes on offer, with intriguing names and descriptions such as the deep purple Magic Molly, the red-fleshed AmaRosa, and the Austrian Crescent, with its "unearthly yields" of pale yellow potatoes up to ten inches long. The best one for newbies like us appeared to be the Pinto, described as a "real workhorse with high yields and excellent resistance to pests and disease. They're pretty, too, with "striking bicolor skins" of yellow and red, and their flavor is described as "buttery and decadent with a creamy texture." For a first experiment with potato growing, it sounds like a sure winner.

So, as our 2019 garden settles in for the winter, we're looking ahead to another year of doing more of the same stuff that worked so well this year—plus a little something new that may or may not work. Only one way to find out!

Disposables not yet ditched

Back in January, when I did my Thrift Week series on disposable items we've replaced with reusable ones, I considered doing a follow-up post on the few disposable items we still use, and what it would cost us to get them out of our lives. However, other and more time-sensitive topics absorbed my attention for a while, and so I never got around to it.

But in the past couple of days, a couple of things (which I'll discuss below) brought the topic back to the top of my list. So here's a quick rundown of the disposable items that I have not eliminated from my ecofrugal life, and why:

1. Almond Milk Cartons
Since we (mostly I) switched from cow's milk to almond milk, our household's waste output has actually risen significantly. Unlike dairy milk, which is cheapest to buy in recyclable plastic jugs, almond milk can be purchased most cheaply in plastic-lined cardboard cartons that can't be recycled anyplace that I know of. (The Almond Breeze website claims that its cardboard cartons are in fact recyclable for "nearly 12 million households in 26 states in the US," but ours doesn't happen to be one of them.) These cartons now make up by far the biggest component of our household trash.

Now, there are some brands of almond milk that are available in large plastic jugs, such as (again) Almond Breeze. However, it's not clear what type of plastic these jugs are made from. The fact that the jug is opaque suggests to me that it's probably a #5 plastic, which our curbside recycling (along with most recycling programs around the country) no longer takes. Unless there's a brand out there that comes in recyclable #1 or #2 plastic jugs, switching wouldn't solve the problem.

The only reasonable way to eliminate this source of waste would be to start making our own almond milk. However, research I did into homemade almond milk last year suggests that this would actually be quite a bit more expensive than buying it. Without the commercial thickeners the big manufacturers rely on, you have to use a whole lot more almonds per cup to get the consistency right. I calculated that using Kitchn's recipe, which calls for a ratio of one cup of almonds to two cups of water, we'd be paying around $8.57 for half a gallon of almond milk— roughly four times as much as we pay now. Assuming I go through about two cartons of almond milk per week, our cost per year would increase from around $210 to over $890. So that would be an extra $680 per year just to send less trash to the landfill — not to mention the environmental cost of all the additional almonds that would go into the homemade almond milk. It really doesn't make sense from either a financial or an environmental viewpoint.

2. Toilet Paper
It's now been almost exactly five years since I conducted my toilet paper tracking experiment, in which I counted how long it took me and Brian to go through a 12-pack of toilet paper and used that info to figure out how much TP we use in a year. After finding that it took us exactly 64 days to use up a dozen rolls, I calculated our usage at 68.5 rolls per year, for an annual cost of $25.66. Since then, the cost of Trader Joe's TP has gone up from $4.50 per dozen to $4.99, bumping up our annual cost to $28.46, but we're still not exactly breaking the bank on this stuff.

So I was somewhat baffled to see a Reddit post claiming that a bidet would "pay for itself in savings." The author argued that "the average person uses about 50 rolls of toilet paper a year...and a family of four spends about $250 annually on the stuff," and I thought, whaaaaaat? I realize our usage of 34 rolls per person per year may be a bit below average, and we're certainly paying less than the average person for each roll, but surely it can't be that big a difference!

Just to make sure, I crunched the numbers for the most extravagant, plushiest toilet paper I could find: Quilted Northern Supreme. This stuff is certainly a lot pricier than Trader Joe's, at a whopping $1.17 per roll. But even so, at 50 rolls per person per year, that's only $234 per year for a family of four. What does this poster think the "average" American family is wiping its tushes with, dollar bills?

Moreover, even if you accept the $250-per-year claim at face value, it's still unclear that a bidet would be a money-saver. In my initial research on this topic, I found that in theory, at least, a bidet is used not to replace toilet paper but to achieve "complete cleanliness" after wiping. Now, some people obviously ignore this advice and use the bidet for cleaning, but they still need to dry off afterwards. They've either got to use TP for that, which would use up at least half as many sheets as simply wiping, or use a towel or washcloth, which then has to be washed, adding to annual laundry costs.

Assuming that (a) you live with three other people, all sharing one bathroom, and (b) you're currently using the most expensive TP possible and actually paying a total of $250 per year for the family, and (c) you spend $200 for a bidet seat at Lowe's, and (d) you immediately start using it with reusable towels, eliminating your TP cost entirely, and (e) the additional water used by the bidet itself and the extra loads of laundry comes to no more than $50 per year, then this device could pay for itself in one year. But that's an awful lot of ifs. And it's quite clear that for my family, with only two people and a $28.46-per-year TP bill, it would take at least 4.4 years to pay for itself, probably longer. So unless the price of TP goes up a lot, or the price of bidets comes way down, I can't see this being cost-effective for us.

There is still, of course, the "family cloth" alternative: using reusable cloths for wiping, rather than toilet paper. But given the additional equipment and laundry required (basically equivalent to having a cloth-diapered infant in the house), it hardly seems worth the effort to save, at most, $28 per year.

3. Dental Floss
The last time I measured our household trash, back before the almond milk cartons swelled our waste stream, dental floss was actually a significant component of it. It was also a particularly annoying one, since it seems like you should be able to make dental floss out of something that could be composted. However, the cheapest brand I've ever found that meets this criterion is Radius, which is made from silk and costs $4.88 for 33 yards. The standard nylon kind we buy at the drugstore (or get free from the dentist) costs, at most, $2 for 100 yards. Assuming I use 18 inches of this stuff each night (Brian seldom bothers to floss, yet still somehow has better teeth than I do), we go through about 1.8 containers per year, for an annual cost of $3.65; switching to the silk stuff would increase this cost to $26.99. Considering what a small volume of waste we're talking about here, it really doesn't seem worth it.

There's one other alternative I've seen that would be completely waste-free: a water flosser, such as the WaterPik. A study I've seen on these suggests that they're actually quite effective at removing plaque — even better than string floss — so I don't think my teeth would suffer as a result. However, the water flosser has several disadvantages, starting with its cost. The top-rated MOSPRO flosser costs $40, equivalent to nearly 11 years' worth of dental floss. On top of that, we'd have a small ongoing cost for electricity to recharge its batteries. (There's one water flosser, the Carejoy, that doesn't require electricity, but it doesn't get very good reviews.) It's also much bigger than a roll of floss, which fits neatly in the medicine cabinet; we'd have to keep it out on the counter, where our cats would be sure to mess with it. Once again, this doesn't seem like a very good investment for the tiny amount of waste it would eliminate.

4. Cotton Swabs
The final disposable product in our medicine cabinet is cotton swabs. We use these for a variety of tasks: cleaning computer keyboards, dabbing antiseptic on a paper cut, small gluing jobs, and occasionally cleaning ears (yes, I know you're not supposed to do this, but honestly, what else are you supposed to use?). And to be honest, most of the time, I don't really count them as waste. We buy the swabs with cardboard cores rather than plastic ones, so used ones can simply go in the bathroom compost bin. So the only waste these swabs add to our household trash is the plastic container they come in, and since we go through maybe one package per year, that's not much.

However, using waste as a proxy for wastefulness obscures the real environmental cost of disposable products like these. In reality, most of the damage they cause comes not at the end of their life, but at the beginning. And cotton happens to be a particularly costly crop, using large amounts of water and pesticides. (Organic cotton doesn't use the pesticides, but it uses even more water and land, since it takes more plants to produce the same volume of material.)

This past week, I learned of a company that's actually making a reusable alternative: the LastSwab. Made from silicone, it can be washed by hand with soap and water and used over and over. It comes in a "basic" style with a nubby tip, and a smoother "Beauty" style with a fine point for applying make-up. The downside: both versions cost $16. They purport to "replace up to 1,000 cotton swabs," but considering that you can buy 500 cotton swabs at the store for about $3, the LastSwab is still more than 2.5 times as expensive — and unlike the paper-and-cotton swabs we use now, it can't be composted when it reaches the end of its life. So it seems unlikely that it would ever actually pay for itself. (The same company that makes LastSwab is also apparently working on a "LastTissue," which it plans to unveil soon via KickStarter. It's a bit confusing to me, since I thought a reusable tissue was called a handkerchief and could be purchased for a buck or two. But maybe they've come up with a revolutionary new alternative that millennials won't find gross.)


So there you have it: the four disposable products in my life that I'm not actively planning to replace any time soon. Of course, if a truly ecofrugal alternative to any of them comes along — something that's both less expensive and less wasteful — I'll cheerfully snatch at it. But realistically, I'm not expecting that to happen any time soon.

Money Crashers: Best Christmas Gifts for Girlfriends and Boyfriends

Two more of the holiday-themed articles I've written for Money Crashers just came out today, and they're what you might call a matched set. The first, 20 Best Christmas Gift Ideas for Your Girlfriend (on Every Budget), offers up gift ideas for the special lady in your life at different price points: under $20, $20 to $50, and $51 to $100. And the second, 20 Best Christmas Gift Ideas for Your Boyfriend (on Every Budget), does the same for your gentleman friend.

I made a point of stressing in both articles that the ideas listed here are just that — ideas to get you started. I can't tell you the perfect gift for your girlfriend or boyfriend, because I don't know that person like you do. What I can do instead is tell you about gifts other women or men have said they liked, and you can map that onto what you know about your significant other's interests and tastes to come up with an ideal present that fits your budget.

Note that the use of "Christmas" rather than "holidays" in the title was my editor's idea, not mine. I tried to keep the articles neutral, using the word "holidays" throughout, so they'd be appropriate gift guides regardless of what holiday you're celebrating, but I guess my desire for neutrality was trumped by SEO concerns. However, I did succeed in keeping both articles gender-neutral as far as the reader is concerned, so no matter whether you're a man or a woman, you can shop for either a girlfriend or a boyfriend with the help of these pieces.

Grow-your-own decor

For several years now, I've followed the same routine when it comes to seasonal decorations. In the fall, as soon as Jack-be-little pumpkins become available at the farmers' market, I buy three of them for $2 and deploy them on the steps of my front stoop. Those stay up until Thanksgiving weekend, when I stop by the Christmas tree vendors in the Sears parking lot and pick up a big bundle of trimmed-off branches for another buck or two. I bind the longest pieces to the railings of the front stoop with red-and-silver holiday ribbon, add a string of white LED lights, and use what's left of the greenery to make indoor arrangements in flowerpots. I've made some modifications to the indoor decorations in the past few years to make them cat-safe, but the basic decorating scheme has stayed the same. And in a typical year, I don't have to spend more than $5 on it.

But this year, this system ran into a snag. Two snags, actually. First the farmers' market didn't have any Jack-be-littles, so I had to buy them at the supermarket. That cost an extra dollar, but that was no big deal; the bigger problem was that the supermarket pumpkins, exposed to the elements, started to rot within a couple of weeks. I've never encountered that problem with the ones from the farmers' market; sometimes they'd be starting to look a little iffy by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, but I was always able to make them last until it was time to put up the Yuletide greenery. This year, I had to discard two of the three pumpkins well before Thanksgiving, and by that time the store was no longer selling them, so I couldn't replace them.

Then, over Thanksgiving weekend, when we stopped by the Sears parking lot to pick up our evergreens, we discovered that the Christmas tree vendors were no longer there. Even though our Sears store is one of the few in the country that's still in business, the vendors had apparently decided the traffic there wasn't good enough, so they'd left a sign saying that they'd moved to the parking lot of a Staples in Woodbridge, eight miles away. Eight extremely traffic-heavy miles in a direction we never travel normally.

We were reluctant to go that far out of our way solely for the evergreens, so instead, we decided to do a little hunting around the shopping centers in our area to see if we could find anyone else selling trees closer by. While shopping last Wednesday, we cruised through about half a dozen shopping center parking lots and found nothing. We also checked the prices of greenery at the Home Depot and Lowe's, thinking it might be worth paying a bit more for our evergreens if it saved us a stressful trip. They had some, but they were charging $10 for a small bunch less than half the size of the bundle we usually buy from the tree vendors, and probably not enough to decorate more than one of our railings.

So at that point, we decided to go to Plan C. Instead of finding a new tree vendor, we'd see how much greenery we could manage to trim off our own trees and bushes.

Now, since we cut down all the big bushes in front of our house, the only evergreen we have actually on our property is a largish cypress in the back yard, squished up between the garden fence, the back fence, and the shed. However, there's also a cypress in our next-door neighbor's yard that hangs over the fence into our driveway, which puts us within our rights to trim the bits that are encroaching on our property. We were also able to trim off some branches of their yew bushes that were sticking through the fence.

So, between those two and the one in the back, we were able to amass a fairly reasonable collection of greenery, using our recycling bin as a container. The only problem was that it didn't have many of the longer branches that are most useful for attaching to the railings. I could have used a whole bunch of the shorter ones, but it would have been a lot more difficult to tie them on securely. So I opted to decorate only the front railings this year and skip the side porch.

On the plus side, the yew and cypress branches were much less prickly than the spruce and fir we tend to acquire from the tree vendors, so the process of securing them to the railings was much more comfortable than it usually is. I even snipped off some long branches from our rosemary plants to twist through through the lights and cover up the bare wire.

And there was plenty of greenery left over to fill all the vases in the house and make my little flower-pot arrangements for the tops of bookcases. I was even able to make more dramatic displays for the downstairs rooms, with the help of a couple of extra rolls of ribbon I bought last year.

The moral of this little story, I would say, is "Use what you have." Many people, finding themselves unable to buy cheap greenery from the Christmas tree vendors, would have assumed their only option was to pay the inflated prices for it at Home Depot and other home stores. (For that matter, many people would never have thought to get greenery from the tree vendors in the first place; they would have just shelled out $18 for a roll of fresh pine garland every year.)

But for us ecofrugal folks, it makes much more sense to follow the "buyerarchy" outlined in a recent post in the Frugal forum on Reddit. If you need something, instead of running out to the store, first check to see if you can make do with what you have. If you can't, work your way through other options such as borrowing, swapping, thrifting, or making your own. Only if all else fails should you actually have to shell out cash for something new.

I'm dreaming of a thrifted Christmas

Yesterday, my sister sent me a link to a story from the Boston Globe about how more and more people—millennials and post-millennials in particular—are asking their family members and friends not to buy them new stuff for Christmas. Instead, they're requesting secondhand gifts or gifts of experiences, such as museum passes and event tickets. In addition to the individual stories, the article provides survey data to show that nearly half of all Americans would consider giving secondhand gifts, and well over half would be willing to receive them.

In other words, I have once again found myself—to my complete surprise—ahead of the curve.

Because, as you know, Brian and I have been giving secondhand and otherwise green gifts for years. I frequently post a green gift roundup article after the holidays about which of the gifts we gave that year were eco-friendly, and how they went over, as well as about any gifts we received that will help us lead a greener life in the coming year. I even have a column labeled "green" in my holiday Excel spreadsheet (because yes, of course I keep track of all our gifts with an Excel spreadsheet. I am the nerdiest person in the whole entire world.) It denotes what percentage of the gifts we've given were secondhand, purchased from local businesses, or otherwise earth-friendly, and each year I aim to push the percentage a little higher than it was the year before.

This year, I'm pleased to report, we're off to a good start. Earlier today, Brian and I dragged out the box of items we've picked up at yard sales and other events as possible gifts, and we went through it to figure out which of them might be suitable for this year. Some of them didn't make the cut—in particular, an assortment of books, mostly from yard sales, that we'd been holding onto for years in hopes one of our niblings would like them. We finally concluded that any kid in our family who wanted to own these probably already did, so we set them aside to donate to our local library's first annual Children and Teens Book Sale. (We also culled some board games that we never play from our collection for this purpose.)

However, other items in the box were more on-target. Without getting too specific (since some of our relatives occasionally read this blog), we found books we'd acquired at the library book sale, toys and clothes picked up at yard sales, works of art bought from the annual Arts in the Park Event, and pre-owned games that some of our niblings should be just the right age for. Between those and subscriptions to eco-friendly publications, we've already got over one-third of our holiday gifts covered with items that qualify as green.

As for the gifts we still need to buy, we have several ideas about where to shop for additional green items. The aforementioned Children and Teens Book Sale is two weeks from now, and it will afford an opportunity to find not books and games for the children and teens who aren't covered yet—as well as for game-playing families. I've also been cruising eBay for potential clothing gift items, and I've watch-listed a couple I have my eye on. And I can always check out Alibris for specific books I'm hoping to find secondhand.

We've already bought a few gifts that didn't qualify as green (such as the game we gave my cousin, which we encouraged him to open right away so we could play it together over Thanksgiving weekend). And there are a couple of gifts we're making (mostly homemade foodstuffs) that aren't especially eco-friendly. So our gift list won't be 100 percent green this year, but with a little luck, we may be able to come closer than we ever have before.

Money Crashers: Holiday articles

As you know, I've long been a believer that the holiday season (meaning Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, Festivus, and any other winter solstice holiday) should not start until after Thanksgiving. I avoid going into local stores that display Christmas wares before Thanksgiving, and I've actually boycotted stores that started their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving Day. However, this boycott does not extend to my work life, since any holiday shopping article needs to be written well before Thanksgiving in order to make it through to publication in early December. (Once I wrote an article on green gift giving that didn't get published until December 23, with Hanukkah already over and Christmas just two days away, so ever since then I've made a point of being early with these.)

Hence, I've currently got several holiday articles in the pipeline at Money Crashers, and two of them have already been published. However, I've waited until now to publicize them here, so as to avoid thrusting Christmas into your Thanksgiving weekend. Now, with the holiday season officially under way, I can tell you about them.

The first piece, 30 Best Gift Ideas for Foodies (on Every Budget), is about how to find  the perfect gift for a foodie friend. It provides options in several price ranges, from new and interesting ingredients to useful kitchen gizmos to spiffy aprons and chef coats. With so much to choose from, you're sure to find something suitable for your favorite foodie.

The second, How to Create a Holiday Budget and Stick to It, is about using a budget to avoid holiday overspending. Technically, this one may be coming a bit late for those who started their holiday shopping on Black Friday, but it can still help you keep your total spending within limits and avoid a debt hangover after New Year's Day.

By the way, this second piece also includes a long section full of money-saving strategies for the holidays—but after it was published, my editor asked if I could pull those out into a separate article. So at some point in December, most of these tips will get cut from the budgeting piece and moved into the new one. I'll alert you when it comes out.