Thrift Week 2021, Day 2: Flowers

By now, I have my ecofrugal holiday decorating routine pretty much down to a science. I just trim off some branches from all the evergreen trees in (and overhanging) our yard, fill up all the vases in the house with them, bind some onto the front porch railings, and eke it all out with curls of red ribbon and strings of little white lights. I've been using the same lights and ribbons for years, so I can make the house look appropriately festive without spending any money at all.

The problem comes when the holidays are over and it's time to take those decorations down. Refilling the vases with more evergreens doesn't feel right, because I associate those with Christmas time — but there's nothing else in the garden to fill them with, and even the earliest spring flowers are still months away. And simply leaving the vases empty makes the room feel sort of bare and bleak, right at the very time when the world outside is barest and bleakest and the indoors could really use something to brighten it up.

So when I decided to do this local shopping challenge for Thrift Week, I figured it would be a perfect occasion to throw a little business to an establishment I rarely patronize: our local florist. I usually avoid buying cut flowers, not just because of the price but also the pesticides and carbon footprint — but since I'm trying to help local businesses here, I decided that would take the curse off it some. And I hoped that perhaps the florist could recommend something that was sort of winter-appropriate — maybe grown in a local greenhouse rather than shipped from Argentina.

And that's what I got, more or less. He initially pointed me at some mixed bouquets in the front of the shop, but they looked a little too bright and summery, so I inquired about some white flowers in a bucket, which turned out to be freesias sold by the stem. Not wanting to go too overboard, I just bought five of them. When I got home, I clipped some sage off our not-quite-dormant plant to fill out the vase, and now I have a nice, not too un-seasonal display of flowers and greenery to brighten up our living room. (I guess if I'd been thinking, I'd have accepted the florist's offer of some greens to go with the flowers, since the whole point of the exercise was to give them some business. But my frugal habits were kind of working on autopilot, so I said no to this "extra" expense without thinking about it.)

Now, since this purchase is one I normally wouldn't make at all, I could say the entire $15 that I spent on it is a cost incurred by shopping locally. But on the other hand, I had more or less decided already to splurge on some cut flowers to brighten up the bleak midwinter, so if I hadn't bought them here I would probably have picked up a bunch at Trader Joe's or someplace. On our last trip there, the closest thing I saw to a seasonal bunch of blooms was tulips at $10 a bunch, so my decision to shop local only cost me an extra $5. So far, I'm actually ahead for the week.