The things I can change

I've always hated the Serenity Prayer. You know, the one that's printed all over on greeting cards, on T-shirts, in people's email signatures: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." It always seemed like such a ridiculous thing to say when we live in a world full of so many horrible things that I clearly can't change and that, just as clearly, are not acceptable. Just because I can't stop war, tyranny, wildfires, tuberculosis, or pointless acts of cruelty, I'm supposed to accept them all as facts of life, the same way Energy Secretary Chris Wright has apparently accepted climate change as just “a side effect of building the modern world"? I'm supposed to feel serene about them? 

But lately, I've begun to think about the lines in a different way—particularly with regard to climate change. In less than eight weeks, the Trump administration has already:

• pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords;
• ordered all references to climate change wiped from government websites;
• canceled billions of dollars' worth of climate and energy grants, even withholding funding from projects that were already under way;
• blocked approval for any new offshore wind projects and revoked authorization for some that had already been approved;
• frozen funding for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program;
• signed executive orders to increase oil and gas drilling and logging in national forests;
• cut thousands of workers from the EPA, NOAA, and the Departments of Energy and the Interior;
• and, most recently, announced plans to repeal the rule that recognizes greenhouse gases are pollutants at all.

Some of these moves are already being challenged in the courts, and many of them will probably be struck down eventually. But I personally can't change them, and sitting around wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth over them won't do any good. I'm not accepting them, not in the sense of seeing them as in any way okay; I'm merely putting them in the category of things that I, right now, cannot do anything about, and setting them aside so I can focus on the things I actually can do.

So, here are three things I'm doing:

1. Pushing for stricter regulation of methane leaks from natural gas pipelines. 

When it comes to methane, there's good news, bad news, and good news. The good news is, we can significantly slow global warming by ending methane leaks from natural gas pipelines. According to one estimate, quickly curbing methane emissions could slow the rate of near-term global warming by 30% and prevent 0.25°C of warming. This can buy us more time to get off fossil fuels and zero out the rest of our carbon emissions. The bad news is, the federal government is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Congress just repealed the Biden-era methane fee that was meant to provide an incentive for gas suppliers to plug leaks, before it even had a chance to go into effect.

But that fee was only ever going to address the biggest leaks, anyway. There are loads of smaller ones that, collectively, have a huge impact. And that's where the other good news comes in: Those small leaks can be tackled at the state level by Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs), which do not answer to the Trump administration. So Climate Changemakers is leading a big push to get people all over the U.S. to email and call their PUCs and ask for stricter regulation on gas leaks. Its website has a series of "playbooks" that can walk you step by step through the process of finding and contacting your PUC, state legislators, and other policy makers. Each playbook only takes around 20 minutes. And because utilities commissioners don't get nearly as much mail as legislators do, they're a lot more likely to pay attention when they suddenly start getting a lot of messages on the same subject. So this is one of those rare actions that's pretty easy and yet has a chance to make a real difference.

2. Donating to effective climate causes.

Some people like to do all their charitable giving once a year, often around the holidays. Others prefer to break it up into a steady stream of regular monthly donations. I like to take a middle ground: I make just one donation a year to every organization on my list, but I spread those donations out over the year so that I only have to make a few each month. And one of the scheduled recipients for March happens to be the Giving Green Fund, which researches and funds climate nonprofits whose strategies are "particularly promising, overlooked and/or underfunded." This allows me to support the most useful and cost-effective climate organizations without having to research them all myself. Also, as Vox notes, funds like Giving Green can time their donations "right when extra funding is most needed"—for instance, when a group is critically short on funds or needs them for a time-sensitive project.

3. Playing board games.

Tomorrow, Brian and I are hosting a board game party for my chapter of Citizens' Climate Lobby. His gift to me last Christmas was a copy of the board game Daybreak, in which each player takes on the role of a major world power and they all work together to find ways to bring down their carbon emissions before the planet tips over the edge into climate disaster. So when Nadine, the head of my chapter, mentioned that she was looking for ideas for the group to have more social get-togethers this year, I suggested a party to play this game together. She has a copy of the game as well, and if we have more people than those two games can handle, we'll open it up to include other cooperative games as well.

Granted, playing games together, even climate-themed games, doesn't directly tackle the problem of climate change. But it will give us a chance to learn more about all the different climate solutions out there, as well as brush up on our teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills. All of which will help prepare us for the work we're still continuing, even in the face of an administration that openly denies climate change is a problem at all and a Congress that seems, at the moment, ready to cede its own power utterly to that administration. Because even if we know we can't make any major progress for at least two years—even if we know we're going to be losing ground in a lot of ways during that time—what exactly is the alternative?

We don't, in fact, have the wisdom to know whether our efforts will really change anything. But we know they won't if we don't try.

Money Crashers: 25 Thanksgiving Potluck Ideas

Normally, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It's not so much the meal itself I enjoy as having the whole family (or at least my dad's side of it) gathered together. As we pass around the food, we share our thoughts about what it is we're most thankful for this year. After dinner, we play a rousing and usually hilarious game of charades. And then we spend the whole weekend hanging out, taking walks in town, hitting the thrift shops in Princeton, playing games, solving the Saturday crossword together. It's a whole weekend to relax and have fun with family.

Obviously, none of that is going to happen this year. Hosting visitors from out of state is definitely off limits, and given how bad the COVID numbers look for New Jersey — and the fact that it's mostly small gatherings driving the spread — I didn't even feel safe having just me and Brian go over to my parents' house for an indoor, unmasked meal. 

So we will have to celebrate Thanksgiving apart, at least physically. But I'm determined to keep as much of our traditional Thanksgiving festivities as possible. We've come up with a plan to play charades online (with the help of a Google form to submit our entries and a corresponding Google sheet to read them from), and I'm working on ways to do other activities online as well — Boggle, thrift shopping, even hide and seek with the kids.

The one thing we can't share is the Thanksgiving meal. I mean, we could Zoom while eating it, as we did for Passover, but we won't be sharing the meal itself. However, for extended family members who live closer together, there actually is a way to do that too: a socially distanced potluck. Just have each person prepare a dish, divvy it up into containers, and deliver them to people's homes. That way, you can all enjoy the same meal, even if you can't be around the same table.

My latest Money Crashers article is for all those who are having socially distanced potlucks this year (as well as for future reference for those who want to enjoy a frugal Friendsgiving potluck next year, when things will — we hope — be back to normal). It's a list of suggestions for dishes you can bring (or in this case, remotely contribute) to a Thanksgiving potluck beyond the obvious mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. Check it out here:

25 Thanksgiving Potluck Food Dishes & Recipe Ideas (Budget-Friendly)

Money Crashers: Two holiday articles

As longtime readers will know, I normally dislike all references to Christmas and other winter holidays before Thanksgiving is over. I've boycotted stores during the holiday season because they started their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving Day; I even do my best to steer clear of stores that display premature holiday decorations before Thanksgiving. Of course, I have to work on holiday-related articles before Thanksgiving, since they have to be started that early if my clients want to get them online before the holidays have actually come and gone. But I still prefer not to promote the published articles until the end of November at the earliest.

However, for these two recently published pieces on Money Crashers, I'll make an exception. Because they both tackle the subject of cutting your holiday spending — and if you want to do that, you need to start planning before the holiday season is officially under way.

For instance, the first piece deals with the topic of making a holiday budget. Now, obviously, a holiday budget does you no good unless you make it before you actually begin any of your holiday shopping and spending. So it makes sense to start working on it now, iron out all the details, and have it all ready to go when Thanksgiving is over and the frenzy of holiday shopping begins. This piece explains how to create one, and offers a few tips on how to keep your spending within it once you actually get started.

How to Create a Holiday Budget & Stick to It – Strategize Your Spending

The second piece tackles the topic of holiday spending in more detail. It helps you strategize for saving on all aspects of the holiday, including gifts, decorating, travel, and entertaining. (Admittedly, those last two will probably look a bit different this year; we'll have to do them extra carefully if we plan to do them at all. But that's all the more reason to start planning ahead early.)

20 Ways to Save Money During the Holiday Season – Tips & Ideas

There are several more holiday articles in the pipeline at the moment, including a new one on ways to celebrate safely during a pandemic. I'll let you know about that one as soon as it pops up, too, so you'll have plenty of time to start planning. And there's one upcoming piece that's Thanksgiving-related, so I'll make sure to notify you about that one even more promptly.

Money Crashers: Four new articles

Four more of my articles have just popped up on Money Crashers. They're not particularly connected to ecofrugality, but they might have some interest to some of you.

The first piece is for you if you've never had a 401(k) plan — or if you have one but don't really understand how it works. It explains the tax benefits of a 401(k), its limitations, and the advantages and disadvantages of using it for your investments. (Spoiler: Yes, you should definitely invest some money in a 401(k) if you have one, and no, you definitely shouldn't do all your investing this way.)

What Is a 401(k) Plan and How Does It Work? – Limits, Rules & Benefits

The second piece is about something pretty much everyone has these days: a credit report. And if you have a credit report, you could have errors on it that you don't know about. In a In a 2012 study, about 1 out of 4 Americans found inaccuracies on their credit report that could affect their credit scores. Luckily, most of the affected consumers were able to correct the errors and improve their scores as a result. Here's what you need to know about how credit report errors occur, how they can hurt you, and how to fix them.

How to Fix Errors on Your Credit Report for Free

Many families look to health care sharing ministries (HCSMs), such as Medi-Share, as an affordable alternative to traditional health insurance. HCSMs work on the same principle as insurance, collecting premiums ("shares") from all members and using the money to pay for the health care costs of those who need help. But make no mistake: HCSMs aren't insurance, and they don't offer the same benefits. This piece explores how HCSMs work, what they cost, how they differ from a regular insurance plan, their pros and cons, and when they can be worthwhile. (Spoiler alert: if there's any way at all you can afford a real insurance policy, choose that instead.)

Health Care Sharing Ministries: A Good Alternative to Health Insurance?

And now for something completely different: Academy Award parties. Many movie lovers delight in throwing Hollywood-style Oscar night parties, complete with real red carpets, signature cocktails, and lavish swag bags for guests. But what if you don't happen to have a Hollywood-style budget? No worries: just substitute planning and creativity for money. This article explains how to plan a truly fabulous Oscar extravaganza on a budget, including Oscar-worthy invitations, glam decorations, red-carpet attire, fabulous food and drink, award-related party games, and your own fabulous swag bags.

How to Throw an Oscar Viewing Party on a Budget  

Money Crashers: 4 Holiday Entertaining & Party Ideas on a Tight Budget

Four years back, I did a post about holiday entertaining. It was inspired by this New York Times article, in which the author challenged an elite party planner accustomed to five- and six-figure budgets to plan a "transcendent" holiday dinner party for eight people in the author's West Village apartment on a "recessionary" budget. His definition of "recessionary" was as $30 a head.

When this story showed up in my Tip Hero newsletter, the comment section on the website erupted with derision. The most common response was along the lines of "$30 a head is cheap?" They found it highly amusing that on a budget that they considered lavish, the best the hotshot party planner could do was a potato-based dinner and paper snowflake decorations. At least one poster scoffed that for that price, she could serve her guests champagne and filet mignon. So I responded with a post about how I would go about throwing a similarly "transcendent" party in my home. I ended up coming up with nature-based decorations, a fancy vegetarian dinner, a homemade pie, and some cheap wine from Trader Joe's, all for about $55—less than a quarter of the budget the original article provided.

In my latest Money Crashers article, I've expanded on that idea. Instead of just one party idea, I've come up with multiple ideas about how to put together the elements of a great holiday party—decorations, food, drinks, and entertainment—on the cheap. First I explore each element in turn, and then I discuss several ways to put them all together to create themed parties on a budget of $40 to $65. Read all about it here: 4 Holiday Entertaining & Party Ideas on a Tight Budget.

Setting the Thanksgiving table on a dollar-store budget

I've complained many times about Christmas creep, the phenomenon of jumping ahead to the "holiday season" earlier and earlier each year, leaving Thanksgiving (and now, it appears, even Halloween) in the dust. As Alexandra Petri of the Chicago Tribune points out, this devalues not only Thanksgiving, but Christmas as well; by the time the holiday actually arrives, everyone's already sick of it.  ("I complain about it every year," she laments, "and it still happens. It is almost as though writing about things on the Internet had no impact on them whatsoever.") The solution she proposes is to keep the focus on Thanksgiving as much as possible: "Buy Thanksgiving greeting cards. Insist on turkey garlands. Dress up as a pilgrim. Dress up as a turkey. Clap and shout, "I do believe in Thanksgiving! I do! I do!" Anything you can think of."

So, as my contribution to this movement, I'm going to do a post on Thanksgiving entertaining. I already did one three years ago on how to throw a great holiday party on a reasonable budget; now it's time to give Thanksgiving its fair share of the attention.

The idea behind this post came from an article I saw in the November issue of Good Housekeeping, which, to be fair, is actually all about Thanksgiving (though it was undermined somewhat by the fact that the "fabulous holiday issue," decked out in red and green, arrived at the same time). The article bills itself as "An Easy Lesson in Beautiful Table Settings," showcasing four different styles for decking out the Thanksgiving table. The four place settings, which you can view in a slideshow on the Good Housekeeping website, feature distinctive styles of dishes, glassware, flatware, and napkins or other decorative objects, with accompanying text telling you where to buy them and how much they cost. The cheapest of the four place settings—a "fresh modern" look in stark, minimalist white—cost $55; the most expensive was $117. That's for one place setting, mind you. If you had a dozen people at your holiday table, as my family does, you could spend over a grand just to set the table, before you even put a scrap of food on it.

Even more irksome, to me, were the cutesy place cards accompanying each table setting. For one thing, I've never been at a Thanksgiving meal where we actually needed place cards, and frankly, I'm not sure I'd ever want to spend the holiday with a bunch of people I didn't know well enough to sit down to a meal with unaided by formal seating arrangements. But even supposing, just for the sake of argument, that I decided to make place cards for our Thanksgiving gathering just because I thought they would look cute, why on earth would I need to attach each one to a colored glass bottle (for which the article advises you to "hit up your local flea market"), or a faux pheasant feather, or a spray-painted pear? (That one probably bothered me the most of all, because a pear is food, and spray-painting it so that it's no longer edible is wasting food, which is about as un-frugal as it's possible to be. If you want to stick your guest's name on a pear, then for heaven's sake, why not just use the pear in its natural state? It looks just as nice that way, and after the meal is over, you can remove the little tag and save the pear for breakfast. Spray-paint it, and all you can do with it afterward is throw it out; it probably isn't even safe to put in the compost bin.)

So I decided to put together an elegant place setting to rival those featured in Good Housekeeping on as low a budget as possible. Of course, in real life, I'd simply use the dishes, glassware, flatware, and napkins I already own, and if I wanted to dress up the table a bit, I'd do it by folding the napkins into fancy shapes and making a nice centerpiece of some kind. But assuming I didn't actually own any of that stuff, or didn't own enough pieces to host a large group, how would I build an elegant table setting from scratch on a bare-bones budget? To me, there was just one obvious answer—one that started with "Dollar" and ended with "Tree."

I don't get out to Dollar Tree very often these days, since the one closest to us closed down, but it's actually one of my favorite places to browse aimlessly. They have such a huge variety of stuff there, from food to cleaning supplies to housewares and even clothing. You never know just what you're going to find there, but you know that anything you find can be yours for only one dollar. And I remembered quite distinctly that, on previous visits, I'd seen plates there, and glasses, and maybe even utensils. If I needed to outfit a table for a big party in a hurry and on the cheap, it's certainly the first place I'd look.

So, on Wednesday, while running another errand, we stopped in. I headed for the tableware section and quickly discovered that the problem with this plan wasn't going to be finding something I liked; it was going to be deciding which of the many styles available I liked best. They had a remarkable variety of dishes, plain and patterned, in white and every color of the rainbow (plus a few that the rainbow leaves out).

Glassware, too, was available in a vast array of styles: stemware and tumblers, colored and clear, delicate and hefty.

With all the choices there, I could easily have put together four place settings in different styles, just like the folks at Good Housekeeping. But I decided to show some restraint and limit myself to two. For a simple, elegant look, I chose these white plates with a gold-edged rim:

And to go with them, a set of tumblers with a matching gold rim:

Then, for a more colorful and festive look, I chose these casual dishes in a vivid, country-themed pattern:

And, to play up the color scheme, stemware with a clear bowl and a green stem:

My job was only half done, however. I'd found dishes and glasses, but the Dollar Tree couldn't help me with either napkins or flatware (except the disposable variety, which, aside from being wasteful, don't cut it as elegant in my book). To round out my place settings, I'd have to turn to the Great Marketplace of the Internet.

Fortunately, finding these items cheap online was pretty easy. A quick search turned up a wide selection of napkins at a site that supplies the bridal industry. I figured satin napkins in "champagne," at 62 cents each, would go well with the gold-rimmed plates, while more casual polyester napkins in dark red, for 53 cents each, would complement the multicolored ones. These prices don't include shipping, because I didn't want to put the items in my cart to calculate it, so I just rounded up and assumed the napkins would cost a dollar apiece with shipping.

Flatware was a little trickier. On the restaurant supply sites, it was mostly sold by the piece, and I figured it would be cheaper by the set. So I tried eBay, where I found this 44-piece set—8 place settings—for a "Buy it Now" price of $41.50 with shipping. That's a little over $5 per setting, and the simple "New Century" pattern looked like it would go well with either of my place settings. Add it all up, and the place settings come to about $8.33 apiece—less than one-sixth the price of the cheapest setting in the Good Housekeeping article.

There was just still just one little detail left, though. Since Good Housekeeping included place cards in its photo shoot, I figured to be fair, I should come up with ideas for some as well. But I certainly didn't want these to add to the cost of the place settings, so that ruled out any ideas that would require buying supplies from a craft store or "scouring" flea markets. Instead, I stole an idea from party planner David Moen, whose plan for a $30-a-head holiday party, as outlined in the New York Times, inspired my earlier post on holiday entertaining. His place cards were simple teardrop shapes cut out of card stock, with names written in gold marker. I thought for a Thanksgiving meal, you could go one better and cut the cards out of brown kraft paper, since everyone has a couple of brown paper bags lying around somewhere—and instead of a teardrop shape, pick up a nice fallen leaf from your yard and trace that shape onto the paper. The only cost would be a couple of bucks for the marker, which could be reused after the holiday. I even mocked up a little prototype to show what it would look like (though I had to use green marker, since we didn't have a gold one).

That one, because of the gold color scheme, seemed like a good match for the white-and-gold place setting. For the more colorful one, I figured I could do the names on white paper, in colored marker—maybe even a different color for each person—and simply tuck them inside the wine glasses. Maybe even tuck a colorful leaf in there with them, for an extra touch of fall splendor.

So there you go: a choice of two place settings, one traditional and elegant, one cheerful and casual, for under $10 each, with the place cards thrown in. Let's see the Good Housekeepers beat that.

The expandable house

When I was growing up, we didn't have guests over very often. Occasionally we might have one or two people to dinner, but the only time we really had a houseful of guests was at Thanksgiving, when my dad's whole side of the family (his mom, his two brothers, and later, their spouses and my cousin) would come for the whole weekend. At those times, my mom would often say that she wished her house were expandable. Our modest 3-bedroom, 1.5-bath house was plenty of room for just the four of us, but it wasn't enough to hold the whole family comfortably. And nowadays, the problem is even more extreme; the house is more than big enough for the two of them since my sister and I moved out, but the Thanksgiving guest list has now grown to four couples plus two kids. Mom definitely doesn't need or want a bigger house on an everyday basis; having more rooms would just invite more stuff to fill them up. But it would sure come in handy to have a few extra rooms that could be folded up and stored most of the time, where they wouldn't have to be cleaned or heated and cooled, and then set up just for that one weekend.

What struck me about this the last time she mentioned it is that, in essence, an expandable house is exactly what Brian and I have now. We have the rooms we use every day––the living room, the office, the bedroom, the kitchen––and then we have the whole downstairs as, essentially, that extra expansion that we can set up when we have guests. Moreover, it doesn't have just one function; it has been, at various times, a guest bedroom (with its own bath), a board-game parlor, and a music room. (No wonder we had so much trouble coming up with a name for it.) And since it's not in use most of the time, at other times it doesn't need to be cleaned (beyond a quick sweeping or wipe with a rag) or heated in the winter. The very fact that it's not used every day, but only as needed, makes it actually one of the most useful rooms in the whole house.

Thinking about our extra room in these terms makes me feel better about our decision to turn our small room into an additional guest room. I settled on that use for it because I couldn't think a better one, but part of me still felt like I really ought to try to turn the room into some kind of space we would use every day, rather than a guest room that will almost never be used at all. But when I think of our house as expandable, containing the rooms we live in plus the extra rooms we use for guests, then it becomes obvious that by making this room a guest room, we're simply adding it to the expandable part of the house rather than the everyday part. And since we already have all the space we need for our everyday activities, adding this extra room to the expandable section is clearly the best use for it.

Moreover, even after it becomes part of the expansion, this room can still do double duty for all the everyday functions it has now: starting seedlings in the spring, storing cookbooks and pet supplies, sorting our recycling, and wrapping gifts before the holidays. It won't just be changing from one type of room to another; it'll actually be several rooms in one. In fact, maybe we can refer to it by different names––the guest room, the conservatory, the lumber room, or even the recycling room––depending on what we're doing in it at the time.

Cheap thrills for Halloween

Last month, while paging through Better Homes and Gardens, I came on a statistic that absolutely gobsmacked me: Americans typically spend a total of 8 billion dollars each year on Halloween, making it second only to Christmas for the total shelled out on a holiday. Divided over 114 million American households, that works out to about 70 bucks per family. The National Retail Federation predicts that spending is likely to drop to about $7 billion this year due to the uncertain economic climate, but that's still more than $60 per family. What's it all going for?

A Bankrate article pointed me toward some answers to this question. Candy, it says, can run as much as $10 to $15 for a big bag, and the article claims you might need several bags if your neighborhood is a hotbed of Trick-or-Treating. However, that's just the tip of the iceberg: The article also puts the cost of "decor items" at $25 to $50, kids' costumes at $30 each, and adult costumes as high as $140. Dress up two adults and two kids, buy two bulk bags of candy, and shell out for store-bought decorations, and you could easily rack up a tab of over $400 for a one-night event.

On the other hand, there's no real need to spend nearly this much. Indeed, the fact that the average household spending for Halloween is well below this amount shows that, while some families may be shelling out big bucks for this holiday, others are spending much smaller bucks. Moreover, I suspect that these frugal families are probably getting a lot more fun out of the holiday with their DIY costumes and decorations. So, for anyone who's still scrounging around for some last-minute ideas for either treats or tricks, here's my quick list of suggestions for scaring up all the elements of a great Halloween celebration on the cheap.

• Candy. While Bankrate estimates the cost of a big bag of M&Ms at $10 to $15, I've nearly always been able to score candy for much less during the pre-Halloween sales. Last year, according to my usual custom, I picked up two bags of mini Snickers and Three Musketeers bars for $4—and then we actually got only a handful of Trick-or-Treaters, so most of the booty ended up going to Brian's coworkers. But even if you live in a heavily haunted neighborhood, I think four bags for $8 would certainly be enough to feed the hungry masses. Bankrate also notes that many stores mark their candy down dramatically a few days before Halloween to get it off the shelves, so by procrastinating a bit you might be able to score an even better deal. Or you could take a crack at extreme couponing: the Krazy Coupon Lady site lists several sale-and-coupon combos that can get your final cost per bag down to as little as 45 cents.
• Costumes. Store-bought costumes may run $30 to $60 a pop, but as I've noted before on this blog, I think homemade costumes are not only much cheaper but also a lot more fun. When you make your own costume, you can be pretty much anything you can imagine—as you can see from this recent post on Young House Love, which explains how bloggers John and Sheri fulfilled their 3-year-old daughter's request to dress up as "a fairy queen of the jellyfish." And if your family members don't happen to have any brilliant, bizarre ideas, there's no shortage of additional DIY costume ideas online. Bankrate and Spoonful have some creative ideas for both adults and kids (believe it or not, "jellyfish" is actually among them), while Real Simple offers some whimsical last-minute costume suggestions.
• Decorations. This, even more than costumes, is an area in which I think buying ready-made takes all the fun out of it. Why would you ever want to miss out on the chance to go out as a family to the local farm stand, pick up a pumpkin for anywhere from $2 to $10, and carve it yourself? Plus, how could anything you buy at the store ever come anywhere close to the coolness of hand-carved pumpkins like these? (Okay, these are prize-winning pumpkins that generally took around five hours and a set of specialized tools to carve, but come on, even your basic jack-o-lantern with a real candle inside looks a lot cooler than a plastic one that costs 15 bucks.) Bankrate recommends spraying your carved pumpkin with WD-40 so it will last longer, but as Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) points out in her Tightwad Gazette books, you get even better value by carving the pumpkin the day before Halloween, bringing it back in the day after, and turning it into puree that you can enjoy in your Thanksgiving pies.
• More decorations. Even if you're after something a little more elaborate than a simple Jack-o-Lantern, surely you can give freer rein to your creativity by building something from scratch than by buying off the shelf from Party City. Once again, there are plenty of sites online just teeming with ideas, from Martha Stewart's elaborate designs to BHG's kid-friendly projects. 
• Party fare. Naturally, Martha Stewart also has some recipes for spooky treats (and creepy cocktails) to grace your Halloween get-together. But even simple classic homemade treats like popcorn balls and roasted pumpkin seeds are classics, and the ingredients for them are super cheap. Heck, if you're carving your own pumpkin, the seeds come free.

Here's hoping that these ideas will inspire one or two people out there to break out of the big box and try doing it themselves this Halloween—if not for the savings, then for the sheer fun of it. Happy Halloween!

Our Big Fat Cheap Wedding

About a week ago, I was invited to respond to a questionnaire from American Public Media (you know, the folks who sponsor "Marketplace" and "A Prairie Home Companion") on the topic, "How much is too much to spend on a wedding?" I was delighted to have a chance to comment on this, because I've often thought that it was the experience of planning our wedding (nearly eight years ago now, yikes) that really got me into the whole concept of ecofrugality.

It really started with the rings; even before we officially became engaged, I had already decided that I didn’t want to buy new gold wedding rings because of the environmental impact of gold mining. And this decision was only reinforced by a copy I found online of a "Millennium Report" on wedding costs by Bride's magazine, which revealed that the average couple in 2000 had spent about a thousand dollars on the wedding bands—not counting the engagement ring, which usually weighed in at close to $3,000 all by itself. “Good grief,” I thought, “wouldn’t it make more sense for most couples to put that $4,000 toward the down payment on a house?”And so I began searching for sources of secondhand rings, and I eventually ended up buying a simple pair of white-gold bands on eBay. We got them resized by a local jeweler, and the total cost came to just under $100.

After that, I was off and running, determined to make every aspect of our wedding as frugal and green as this initial purchase. My goal was to avoid all the waste associated with the typical American wedding—or at least, the typical American idea of what a wedding should be. At least a month's salary for an engagement ring? A grand for the bride's dress? Upwards of $750 for flowers? Fuhgeddaboutit! In fact, seeing that I'd managed to buy the wedding bands for about one-tenth of what the average Bride's reader spent for hers, I decided that my goal would be to do the entire wedding for $2,000—roughly one-tenth of what the survey listed as the average cost of a wedding. I may as well admit right now that I did not meet this goal—in fact, I went over budget by about 35 percent. But the great thing about having a $2,000 budget to start with is that exceeding it by 35 percent means you only overspent by hundreds, not thousands. And simply having this goal, even if it turned out to be unrealistic, forced me to think much more creatively about the whole process. In the end, it helped us end up with a wedding that was (I think) much more beautiful, personal, and meaningful for both of us than yet another mass-produced white-satin-and-champagne extravaganza.

Here's a partial list of the decisions we made about our wedding, and what made them frugal and (in some cases) green:

• The invitations. According to the Bride's survey, the average couple in 2000 spent about $325 on invitations, announcements, thank-you notes, and so on. Some sources suggested sending out an e-invite as a way of cutting costs, but although I had to admit this was a green choice (hey, save a tree!), it just didn't feel right. A formal occasion deserves a formal invitation, I reasoned, and our society in 2004 still had not really reached the point at which any correspondence sent electronically could be considered formal. So we went instead with the second-cheapest method and printed out our own invites on our home computer. We picked up a set of cards and envelopes for 20 bucks at Staples, and the cost of the ink, since we refill our printer cartridges, was trivial. We didn't bother with special wedding-themed stationery for our thank-you notes but just used note cards we already had. The cost for everything, including postage, was just under $60.
• The location. We got married in a state park, in a private picnic grove that we reserved for $50. (We did spend an extra $130 to cover parking costs so our guests wouldn't be charged admission to the park.) The only shelter was a covered pavilion, and our only backup plan for rain was to buy some drop cloths to cover the sides of the pavilion and some bricks to hold them in place. Luckily, we didn't have to deploy them, or it would have been a pretty tight squeeze to hold the reception in there. Instead, we were able to eat at the picnic tables scattered around the grove, which we covered with disposable dollar-store tablecloths (admittedly not the greenest choice, but buying proper tablecloths, even secondhand, would have been prohibitively expensive).
• The attire. Our wedding ceremony was "after the manner of Friends" (which means "Quaker style"), so we didn't have a wedding party to outfit. Brian wore his "good suit" that he bought when he finished grad school; I bought a Renaissance-style bodice from a vendor on eBay, and my mother-in-law-elect made a simple A-line skirt to go with it. Both pieces are still hanging in my closet, and while I must confess I haven't yet had had another occasion to wear the skirt (though I've thought of dyeing it for future use), I habitually wear the bodice—usually paired with blue jeans—on my anniversary. Oh, and instead of a veil or headpiece—an item on which Bride's readers spent $166 on average—I wore a wreath of ivy, dried flowers, and ribbon that cost about $5 altogether. (I've still got the rest of the floral wire stowed away somewhere...)
• The flowers. I was especially proud of these. I've never been all that crazy about cut flowers anyway (a flower that's been cut is no longer growing, and what kind of symbol is that for a new marriage?), so I took a risk and waited until the Friday before the wedding to pick up live plants at my local farmer's market. One vendor had double impatiens that looked like miniature rosebushes, and I bought up every pot they had, at $1 a pot (!). Most of them became centerpieces for the tables, but some got repotted in larger containers to flank the entrances to the pavilion. After the wedding, we invited our guests to take them home, so none of them went to waste. So our flowers were locally grown and still growing—what could be greener than that?
• The food. We did, after some debate, decide to hire a caterer. A potluck was impractical because so many of our guests were coming from out of town, and doing it all ourselves would have been too stressful. But because we had an afternoon wedding, we could opt for a lighter meal—sandwiches (including vegetarian options), fruit, cheese, cake, punch, and coffee/tea. (No alcohol was permitted in the park, which made that money-saving decision an easy call.) It was our largest expense, but well worth it, especially the cake (which was, if I do say so, the most delicious cake I've ever had at a wedding or anywhere else. We now go back to the same bakery and get that same cake every year on our anniversary.) And we sent the leftovers home with friends, so nothing went to waste.
• The photos. We just got lucky with this one; some dear friends of ours—in fact, the very couple who introduced us—happened to have a side business doing wedding photos and provided ours at cost as a wedding present to us. But if that hadn't been an option, we'd probably just have asked our families to supply us with copies of any snaps they happened to take and satisfied ourselves with that. It's not as if we need a photographic record to remember the day.
• The stuff we didn't have. According to the Bride's survey, most couples in 2000 spent $393 on a limo; we drove to the park in our own car. They spent $830 on music at the ceremony and reception; we invited our musician friends to bring their instruments and jam. They spent over $3,000 on an engagement ring; we followed the Elizabethan tradition of wearing the wedding rings on our right hands during our engagement and then switching hands.

I provided the highlights of the list above in my response to the APM survey, and I was pleased to see that they chose to include my story (or at least a portion of it) on their website. (I was less pleased, however, to see that my description of our Quaker-style wedding was mistranscribed as "after the manner of 'Friends'," which makes it sound like we based our ceremony on the popular TV show.) The other responses on the site are interesting; they run the gamut from couples whose own wedding cost less than ours (though maybe not after adjusting for inflation) to a Utah bride-to-be who's hoping to keep her wedding costs down to $17,000 (and rejoicing that she's not holding the event in Washington, DC, where she used to live, and where she says hair and makeup alone can easily cost $400).

Frugal meets elegant

This will probably be my last post for a while, since we're off to Indiana soon to celebrate the holidays with my in-laws. I have a whole list of profound, serious topics I could write about for this farewell post, such as why Europeans save more than Americans do, or whether the celebrated female love of shopping is nothing more than a response to social disempowerment, or whether working less and spending less could be the key to a longer, happier life. But the fact is, the topic I really feel most drawn to right now is holiday parties. Specifically, how to have one without spending a ridiculous amount of money.

This is actually inspired by an article that appeared three years ago in the New York Times, in which the writer challenged David Monn, party planner to the stars, to help him "design a transcendent holiday dinner party for eight at my West Village apartment on a recessionary budget — say, $30 a head." When this link turned up in the budget-oriented Tip Hero newsletter, the bulk of the responses were along the same lines as mine: "$30 a head is cheap?" Several respondents also found it ludicrous that the best the celebrated event planner could do with this austere budget was twice-baked potatoes for a main course, a store-bought cake for dessert, and paper snowflakes (like the ones you made in grade school) for decoration. How, the group wondered, did he ever manage to spend $240 on that?

So I decided to pose the same challenge to myself and see just how much more cheaply I could do it. My normal idea of a great holiday party is a potluck supper, caroling, and board games, but to make it a fair test, I challenged myself to plan the same type of party the author of the article wanted: an elegant dinner for eight, complete with holiday-themed decor. Since the closest thing our house has to a formal dining area is in our large downstairs room, guests would have to pass through a good bit of the house to get to it—so the decorations would have to cover not just the dining area itself, but also the living room, hall, and kitchen, to keep the mood going from the time guests walk in the door.

Fortunately, since tasteful holiday decorations tend to be natural and understated, they are easy to make quite cheaply. A Google search for "balsam centerpiece" reveals a variety of pieces ranging in price from $25 to $55 (plus shipping), but our local Christmas tree vendor will be glad to let you gather up an armload of trimmed-off evergreen branches for nothing, and pine cones are easily found under any convenient clump of pine trees. I can also gather clumps of red berries from the sidewalk near my neighbor's house, where a large holly tree obligingly drops them throughout December, and red pillar candles are just $2.50 each at IKEA. That means that for just $7.50, I could put a holiday centerpiece on the dining table and smaller ones in the living room and kitchen—and to keep the festive mood going along the the hallway, I'd deck out each of the doors with a single jingle-bell ornament (available in packs of six from the dollar store) hung from a length of colorful holiday ribbon (also from the dollar store). Total cost for decorations: $10.50 (or $12.50 if I give a tip to the tree sellers).

David Monn also spent some of the $240 budget on prettying up the table, using a $13 roll of what the article called "quilting batting" (though the audio slideshow calls it "bunting," which is probably more accurate) as a tablecloth. We happen to have a nice white tablecloth already that fits our dining table at full extension, but we don't have a matched set of eight napkins—and while we do have eight matched dinner plates, they're Corelleware, with a blue-and-green pattern that isn't particularly elegant or Christmasy. But no problem; I could just borrow my mom's china, a nice white with a simple gold rim that would fit into the holiday decorating scheme just fine. (She'd probably be happy to see it put to good use, since it just sits in a cabinet most of the year.) I might even decide to invest ten bucks in a set of marked-down napkins from Pier 1, since none of ours are Christmas-appropriate.

Which brings us to the all-important question of what to serve. This is the area where I won't skimp: I'll keep the meal as frugal as I can, but not if it means compromising on delicious. (No store-bought cake for me, thank you.) Consulting our recipe files, I found a main dish that's both elegant and frugal: butternut squash cassoulet, from Cooking Light magazine. To fill out the "transcendent" menu, I'd start with the citrus spinach salad from The Clueless Vegetarian, and conclude with one of my husband's famous homemade apple pies. Grocery list:

2 bunches spinach (organic): $5.00
4 large oranges (about 1.5 pounds) (organic): $2.25
1 Vidalia onion: $.50
1 head garlic: $.26
4 ounces bacon ends (from the Amish market, $4.00/lb): $1.00
2 yellow onions: $.22
1 butternut squash (about 2 pounds) (organic, sale price): $2.50
2 pounds dry white beans: $3.00
4 large Granny Smith apples (about 1.5 pounds) (organic): $3.00
1/2 lb. sugar (organic): $.80
1/2 lb. butter (sale price): $1.00
1 lb. flour (store brand): $.36
1 container vanilla ice cream (store brand): $2.50
Total: $22.39. This doesn't count the little bits of other ingredients—olive oil, vinegar, veggie broth, Parmesan cheese, herbs, spices, corn starch, and lemon juice—so if we tack on a couple of extra dollars for that, we can estimate that $25 will cover all the food.

The party in the article also included six bottles of Three-Buck Chuck, which seems like an awful lot of wine for eight people, especially if six of them are driving home. We're not really wine drinkers ourselves, but assuming that our guests are, we'll add on just two bottles for the six of them, to ensure that they can enjoy themselves and still make it home in one piece. So that makes another $6 for wine—or about $7 with tax.

So, tallying up the cost of my frugal party:
Food: $25
Wine: $7
Tableware: $10
Decorations: $12.50
Total: $54.50—less than 25 percent of what the couple in the Times spent. And I think my frugal menu and decor are every bit as elegant as David Fancy-Pants Monn's.


And on that note, I bid you all farewell for the time being, and happy holidays!

Swap 'til you drop

A recent issue of my Live Cheap newsletter pointed me toward this article from USA Today about a growing trend: clothing swaps. Trading clothes with friends is hardly a new concept, and parties for that purpose (sometimes known informally as "naked lady parties") have been around for a while. What's new is the scale on which swapping is now being done. A group in Massachusetts called the Swapaholics hosts huge swap meets for 200 to 300 people in school gyms and warehouses. Online groups are also getting into the act. On sites like SwapMamas.com and SwapTreasures.com, people post what they have to offer and what they are seeking in exchange—a bit like Freecycle, except that you always give and take at the same time (and, since these aren't exclusively local groups, you may have to pay shipping costs).

This article was rather timely for me, because I engaged in a bit of swapping myself over May Day weekend. Knowing that I would be making a couple of visits on Friday and Saturday, I hauled along a bag full of clothes in good shape that I wasn't wearing for one reason or another. My mom took three items, including a lovely cashmere turtleneck that was too itchy for me (yes, my skin really is so sensitive that even pure cashmere irritates it), and friends at a potluck party on May Day took several more. I'm happy to see my unused clothes go to people who will use and appreciate them, and I got an unexpected bonus: someone else at the party happened to be getting rid of a long lace-up dress in a blue-flowered print that fit me just beautifully. So now I have one new item that I will actually wear, plus the closet space to keep it in.

Swapping clothes and other goodies is an ecofrugal three-fer: you get new-to-you stuff without having to pay for it, you get rid of unwanted stuff without sending it to the landfill, and you keep someone else's unwanted stuff out of the landfill as well. There's really no down side. I've only done it on a small scale up until now, but I definitely intend to check out some of the swap-sites listed in the article. Watch this space for follow-up info on how it goes.