The gift of less stuff

We're in the middle of a busy couple of months. Between events with Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), Morris dance performances, and stuff we're doing with family and friends, we don't have a single free weekend until June. And some weekends, including this one, are crammed full of events on both days. Today, I was "tabling" (staffing a table at a street fair) for CCL in the afternoon, and we're going to the opening of our local outdoor movie series tonight; tomorrow, we have a Morris performance down in South Jersey during the day and a CCL get-together in exactly the opposite direction in the evening. With all that going on, this hour before dinner is about the only time I've got to update my blog, so you're only getting a quickie post this week.

One of the things that kept us busy last weekend was Mother's Day. My mom is a difficult person to buy gifts for, because her house is so full already that she doesn't need any more stuff. On the contrary, she's always saying she wants to get rid of the stuff she has. So, last year, I had a brainwave: I offered, as my Mother's Day gift to her, to come to her house and spend the day helping her clean out one room of her choice. I didn't suggest this because she had any heavy boxes to move, nor because I thought I could do a better job than she could deciding what to throw away, what to keep, and where to put it. The main advantage of having me there all day was that it would force her to sit down and do the work of going through things, instead of wanting to do it and never finding the time. And it seemed to work pretty well. She chose her office, and by the end of the day we'd cleared away all the piles of paper in there, removed some old things of mine that had been sitting in that room since it was my bedroom, and put all her computer equipment in places where she could easily find it.

Since that was such a success, I decided to give her the same "gift" this year. This time around, she decided to get a bit more ambitious and tackle the sun porch, which is a repository of all kinds of miscellany: decades-old toys, plants and garden supplies, old sporting equipment, a big bookshelf full of board games and puzzles, and a huge stack of my old notebooks from high school and college. Mom seemed to think we could go through this stuff quickly and maybe have time to move on to another room, but I suspected we wouldn't even make a dent in the contents of the the porch itself. 

It turns out the answer was somewhere in the middle. We didn't clean out the whole porch, but we did get through a lot more of it than I expected. I spent a large portion of the day going through my old notebooks, pulling out the few things I wanted to keep (mostly stories and poems that I didn't have digital copies of), then breaking down the notebooks themselves so the contents could be recycled. I discarded so much paper that I had to split it between two separate bins so they wouldn't be too heavy for my dad to haul to the curb. But I also found time to review the contents of several bins and shelves with my mom. She opted to keep a lot more of the games and puzzles than I would have in her place, but we still set aside quite a lot of them to give away. We also cleared out things from the bins I'd had no idea were in there: a couple of giant "magic bubble wands," several old tennis rackets, a baseball bat and a few balls, multiple Frisbees, an old model airplane kit, and even an old jump rope of mine that I hadn't seen in decades.

All that stuff went downstairs into the storage room, where it will sit until Hopewell holds its next town-wide yard sale. My parents aren't planning to host an official sale, but they'll haul out a folding table, set it up on the lawn, and put out all their unwanted items with a big sign saying that everything (barring the table itself) is free. They hope that the yard-sale shoppers, always eager for a bargain, will snap up most of it, leaving them with only a few items to either Freecycle or discard.

All in all, I'd say this was a pretty ecofrugal present. It was something my mom actually wanted, and it cost nothing and used no natural resources to produce. Better still, it helped get all this unwanted stuff out of the house and, hopefully, into the homes of people who can use it—people who might otherwise have spent their own money, and the planet's resources, on new products. In fact, it worked so well I'm thinking of offering the same gift to my dad for Father's Day next month. (That will result in one more rather full weekend in June, but at least it will be only one weekend out of an otherwise quiet month.)

A completed birthday project (and one to come)

Last January, I asked Brian for my most ambitious DIY birthday gift ever: cleaning up our unfinished workshop/laundry room/storage room. I wanted to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff, neatly organize the stuff that remained, and most importantly, cover up the bare insulation that currently served as the wall surface. I knew at the time I asked that this was a big project that might take up to half a year to finish. But as it turns out, that was a serious underestimate. 

It took us a couple of months just to get around to the first stage of the project. In March, we went through all the stuff in the room and identified several things we didn't need: a junker bike we'd picked up off the curb, loads of other bike parts, my unused guitar case, a hanging-file box, a big box full of brown glass bottles that we'd picked up for free at a yard sale and used only a few of, a box of wooden blocks, and a packing tape dispenser. We donated all the bike stuff to the New Brunswick Bike Exchange and disposed of the rest without difficulty on Freecycle. 

After that, we couldn't get started on covering the walls until we'd bought the necessary lumber. But since it came in large sheets and our little Honda couldn't possibly hold more than one, this step required renting a truck. We finally got around to doing that in June, when we were able to use the same truck to pick up a new patio set from Craigslist (along with the lumber for Brian's planter project). The year was more than half over before we actually got the boards cut to size and up onto the walls (first flipping around the batts of insulation so that the moisture barrier was properly positioned on the outside, facing toward the heated space). And it took us all the way until my next birthday—and just a little bit longer—to complete the job of tidying and reorganizing the stuff that remained.

But tidy it we did, and I'm ready at last to unveil the final result. First, as a reminder of what we were up against, here's the "before" picture of the room as it looked when I asked for this present a year ago. 

And here's the "after," as seen from roughly the same angle.

The lighting is still terrible for photography, but everything else is so much better. The two remaining bikes are both neatly hung from the ceiling, the boxes are all neatly stowed on the shelves, the work table has been cleared off, and all the tools have been arranged so that they're visible and easy to access.

Here it is from another angle: the before...

...and the after. In this shot, you can see the neat reorganization of the shelves, the workbench (which has a usable surface for the first time in years) and, most of all, the scrap wood pile. It's now all neatly tucked into the back corner, arranged by size, rather than spilling out onto the floor.

 

Let's come in for a couple of close-ups. Here's one of the wall nearest the door, with its nice new wood covering. In addition to hiding away the insulation, the OSB wood panels make a suitable spot for hanging things. We put up a little hook to hold our clothespin bag (my old purse) and hung up the extra sections of our shoe rack to provide convenient, accessible storage for safety gear and extension cords. This also had the advantage of getting them out of their storage box so we could throw it away, freeing up more shelf space.

And here's a look at our reorganized tool storage. We already had that pegboard and most of the hooks; it was just a matter of arranging them optimally to display most of our tools. The few that don't fit are either tucked in a toolbox or neatly laid out on the cabinet below. (We did buy a few extra tool hooks, but they cost less than $15 total.)

The one problem with this new layout is that I can't quite reach the top row of tools on the board. But Brian addressed that with one more DIY piece, completed just today: a little step stool made out of scrap lumber. (He realized after completing it that the supports were placed too far in, so he added markings to indicate where I could step on it without tipping it over. But he'll probably take it apart and reassemble it at some point.)

Here's one last area that I didn't manage to get a good "before" picture of: the floating shelf over the utility sink. Previously, this shelf was a piece of MDF that was seriously bowed under the weight of all the various detergents and cleaning tools piled on it. Now it's a smaller piece of leftover plywood that neatly holds a pared-down assortment of cleaning supplies we'll actually use.

So how much did the project cost in total? Well, it depends on how you count. We spent $244.56 on lumber at Home Depot, but about half of that was for the planter project, so that's only about $125 for the walls. Add the $15 or so we spent on tool-hanging hardware, and that's around $140 worth of supplies. But if you include the $102 we spent on the U-Haul to get all that lumber home, that brings the total cost to around $242—still less than the cost of the closet doors that were my 2016 birthday present, but not by much. And in terms of time and elbow grease, this project was probably at least as demanding.

After this complicated project, I'm hoping my birthday request for this year will be a lot easier to fulfill. Over the years, the grout in our shower has become increasingly stained, despite my best efforts to keep it clean. Also, bits of it have fallen out, leaving deeper gaps between the tiles, which makes the stains even harder to remove. So, for this year, I've asked to redo all the grout, then seal it so that it will stay put and stay clean. We've done this job once before, so we know we can handle it, but last time we neglected the sealing step. I'm hoping that with a good sealant, we can keep the grout clean and intact for at least a few years, and when it starts to wear off, we can just reapply the sealant instead of having to replace all the grout. I've already invested in a bottle of Aqua-X Grout Sealer, which got good reviews from several professional review sites (including this professional tiler). Now all we need is a tub of grout and—always the tricky part—a free weekend to apply it.

Yard-sale haul 2024

Most years, when we head out to shop Highland Park's annual yard-sale weekend, we aren't looking for anything specific. Our goal is simply to score the most interesting, fun, and/or useful items for the lowest total sum of money. These days we tend to pass over the sales that focus on kids' toys, since we no longer have any children under 10 in our lives, but we always brake for books, board games, adult clothing, or tools that we don't currently have.

This year, however, we did have a particular quarry in mind. Over the past two years, our Christmas gift exchanges have been such a big hit with the niblings on Brian's side of the family that we knew we wanted to do another one this year. But, since we've already done gift exchanges featuring books and board games, we didn't want to repeat either of those themes. So we decided that the theme for this year's exchange would be simply "interesting objects"—something we knew we had a good chance of finding during yard-sale weekend. So, along with seeking out items for ourselves, we were keeping our eyes peeled for any whimsical items that might show up on our neighbors' sale tables. And, as luck would have it, we found some, which is why I won't be too specific in describing or displaying all our finds in this blog entry.

We knew when we set out on Saturday morning that we wouldn't be able to shop for more than a couple of hours at a stretch. I had my monthly Citizens' Climate Lobby meeting at 11:45, and I had to be home by 11:30 to tune in over Zoom. (Normally I go in person, but I wasn't willing to sacrifice an additional hour out of my yard-sale time for the drive.) This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since what seemed at first like perfect weather for a yard sale—bright, clear, and warm—became uncomfortably hot after two hours of traipsing around. 

But we couldn't bring ourselves to head home any earlier than we had to, because the sales were thick on the ground and we were finding lots of good stuff. As we worked our way westward along the south side of town, we accumulated three potential gift items, three books for ourselves, a pair of pants for Brian, a turtleneck for me, and a tall stack of plastic flowerpots, all for a total of just $10. By the time we headed home, all three of the shopping bags we'd brought with us were bulging.

After my meeting and a bite of lunch, we went once more into the breach. This time, we worked our way west along the north side before heading down to the farmers' market parking lot, where we knew there would be a large collection of sales, as well as entertainment from some local bands. Unfortunately, the music was turned up so loud that we couldn't stand to spend much time browsing. However, the thrift shop at the Reformed Church, which is normally open only until 1pm on Saturday, was open for the occasion, so we ventured in there and emerged with two board games and one jigsaw puzzle, all for $5. We also received two freebies at a booth run by Sustainable Highland Park: a packet of butterfly weed seeds (a native plant) and a small, decorative flowerpot much nicer than all the free ones we'd found earlier.

Next we made our way to Pino's bar, which was hosting a thrift market of its own, with both new and used clothing from a large number of sellers. Most of the customers were a lot younger and hipper than either of us, displaying tattoos, piercings, vivid hair colors, and outré outfits such as a black mini dress with a large spider embroidered on the butt. Yet somehow, we didn't look glaringly out of place; I even got compliments on my sun hat and my colorful patchwork skirt. Unfortunately, most of the clothing at the market was either too small, too fancy, or too rich for our blood, but I picked up a nice T-shirt for $2. By that point we were feeling pretty tired, so we plotted a course for home, stopping only at the sales that happened to be on our path. En route, Brian scored one additional item: a set of earphones to replace the unreliable pair he uses at work. (He wasn't sure the new ones would work either, but they seemed worth risking $1 on, and once we got home he confirmed that they were usable.)

On Sunday, as usual, we encountered far fewer sales. But, to compensate for that, we saw quite a lot of free piles full of rejects from the previous day's sales. In our first two hours of shopping, we picked up a hedge trimmer, four cool-looking glass bottles, two possible stocking stuffers, and one book, all without spending one red cent. We didn't so much as pull out our wallets until we reached the huge, chaotic sale at the synagogue on South First, and even there we spend only $1 on a little stuffed animal (possibly another stocking stuffer, or possibly too cute to give away). After that, we started wending our way home, peeking at other sales and free piles but not actually acquiring anything except for one small houseplant at a "Mama's Got Too Many Plants" sale. (It was perhaps a tad overpriced at $5, but Brian felt the need to help out a fellow gardener.)

Here you can see our complete haul for both days (strategically arranged to disguise the future gift items). Total money spent: $24. Total time spent: 7 hours. Being part of the joyful chaos that is the annual Highland Park sales: Priceless.

Ecofrugal gifting games, 2023 edition

One of our most successful holiday gift ideas this year was a model of ecofrugality. It provided not one, but eight secondhand gifts for family and friends, with a little extra entertainment thrown in—all for just a few dollars.

Last year's round robin gift exchange with our niblings was so successful that we decided we'd try to repeat it this year. Our original plan was to do it with books again, picking up secondhand ones throughout the year and supplementing as needed with new ones. But last summer, as Brian and I were weeding out our collection of board games, it occurred to me that maybe we could make some of these discarded games the basis of this year's gift exchange. This would kill two birds with one stone: finding new homes for the games we no longer played while crossing eight people off our holiday gift list.

After clearing out our game shelves, we had more than eight possible candidates for the gift exchange. As Christmas drew nearer, we supplemented this selection with others that we picked up at the local thrift shop (some of them still in their original shrink wrap) and at yard sales. We picked and chose among these to get the best variety of different games to fit differing tastes. The finalists were:

• Bali, a word game for one or two players
• Rook, a trick-taking card game
• The Sherlock Holmes puzzle case, a collection of mini-mysteries
• Tantrix Match, a pattern-matching game
• A nice wooden version of the classic peg solitaire game
• How to Rob a Bank, in which a team of robbers takes on a team of security guards
• Anomia, a hectic group game with a lot of shouting
• The Resistance, a social deduction game in which you have to find the traitors in your midst
  

But the gifts themselves were just the start. The thing our niblings (and one nibling-in-not-quite-law) seemed to enjoy most about last year's gift exchange was a puzzle that we threw in kind of as an afterthought: a hidden message spelled out by the first letters of the pages where we'd stashed $5 bills. So for this year, we decided to craft a more elaborate treasure hunt based on clues hidden in all the game boxes. Brian's first thought was to put one clue in each box, so the kids could either collaborate or compete to find the hidden treasure first. But eventually he decided it would be better to make them all work together, so he decided the first step in the hunt would be to put together a puzzle. On the back would be either some sort of treasure map or the first in a series of clues leading them to the treasure.

On a video call with his folks, Brian scoped out the house to find good hiding places for clues. These had to be spots that were within reach, but enough out of the way that the clues wouldn't be found by accident before the game had started. Possibilities included a spider plant hanging in the dining room, a curio cabinet in the living room, an old dollhouse in the basement, and the tops of various tall pieces of furniture, such as the grandfather clock. We thought it would be nice to have all the clues joined by a common theme, and after considering several ideas (names of games? Literary quotations? Cards and suspects from the game Clue?) we came up with one suggested by the plant: species names.

On the back of the puzzle, Brian wrote a winding trail of letters spelling out Clorophytum comosum, the Latin name of the spider plant. We knew they could easily find that out with a Google search, leading them to the plant. In the plant pot, we placed a slip of paper with the second clue: Strix occidentalis. Although this is a real species (the spotted owl), there wasn't a real one in the house, but there was a stuffed animal version of it in the family room wearing a baseball cap. Under this cap, we hid the third clue: Brunus edwardii (magnus). This is not a real species, but a search on the name would lead them to a joke article that appeared in a 1972 issue of The Veterinary Record on common diseases of the teddy bear, and the magnus would tell them the specific specimen they wanted was the one known as Big Teddy up in the sewing room. Big Teddy was holding a piece of paper bearing an entirely made-up species name: Erinaceus horologium. The first half of this refers to a genus of hedgehogs, and the second half is Latin for "clock," directing them to the toy hedgehog sitting on top of the grandfather clock in the hall. Under that was the final clue, Chrysochus cobaltinus. This is a real species name referring to a type of blue beetle; there were no such beetles in the house, but there was a model of a blue Volkswagen beetle in the curio cabinet, and behind this we stashed our treasure chest (a cigar box filled with chocolate coins, jewel-like polyhedral dice, and some other odds and ends).

This gift exchange was a big hit. Once we had all eight youths in the room, we laid out the gifts for them to take turns choosing and swapping, and before they'd even finished opening up all the packages, some of them had peeked inside and discovered the puzzle pieces stashed there. This so piqued their interest that they immediately started putting the puzzle together, not even waiting to look at the rest of their presents, so the adults in the room exchanged their gifts to each other while the youngsters set about solving the puzzle and hunting down the clues. The only part we had to help them with was finding the treasure chest hidden behind the blue Beetle; we'd marked it with a slip of paper bearing the traditional X, but they thought that was just the next clue in the series and had to be directed to the box it was sitting on. We did see at least one of them later playing with the game she received in the gift exchange itself, but I think that the hunt-the-treasure game was more exciting for them than the actual presents.

This has led us to two conclusions for next year: First, we should definitely keep this tradition going. Since we seldom see our niblings, it's much easier to get them something they like by having them swap gifts among themselves than just trying to guess who would like what. And second, since the treasure hunt seems to be their favorite part, maybe next year we should start with the puzzle rather than the gifts. That is, rather than choosing presents and designing a puzzle to go with them, maybe we should start by thinking about what would make the best puzzle and selecting gifts (ideally ones we can find secondhand) to fit it. Because with this crowd, apparently, it's the fun that counts.

Ecofrugal gifting games

Happy holidays, everyone! This year, in place of my usual Green Gift Roundup, I'm going to talk about two specific ways our family exchanged secondhand gifts this year. Both of these were gift swaps of a sort, but each involved a different type of gift and was run according to different rules.

The first gift exchange was Brian's solution to the always tricky question of what to give the seven niblings (the delightful gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews) on his side of the family. They range in age from 13 to 19, and we only really see them at Christmastime. Thus, all we really know about their current activities and interests is what Brian hears secondhand from his parents throughout the year. This makes it difficult to select gifts tailored to their tastes. The one thing we know they're all into is reading, but we have no way of knowing which specific books would appeal to each of them and which ones they've already read.

So this year, Brian came up with a clever workaround. He went through the collection of secondhand books we had stashed in our "possible gifts" box and selected five he thought would appeal to a broad range of tastes. (All of these were books we had read ourselves and deemed enjoyable.) The authors represented included Neil Gaiman, Jane Austen, Jasper Fforde, P.G. Wodehouse, and Alexander McCall Smith. Since all of the works were fiction, he also ordered two nonfiction books we had read and liked—How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg and Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein—from Better World Books to add more variety to the mix.  His idea was to wrap these seven books and have all the kids take turns choosing books according to the rules of the classic Yankee swap.

However, he decided that one book per nibling, especially with most of them being yard-sale and library-sale finds we'd acquired for under $5, wasn't quite enough of a present. His original plan was to enclose a gift certificate to Half Price Books with each one so they could add a second book (or two) of their own choice. But when he discovered that the smallest available denomination was $25 and multiplied that by seven kids, he decided that was a little too big a present. Instead, we went to the bank and got a bunch of $5 bills and he stashed three of them inside each book. And to make things more interesting, he decided to choose the pages where the bills were hidden so that the first letters of the verso pages—read in alphabetical order based on the author's names—would spell out the hidden message, "Read a book for Christmas." Then he would offer an additional prize (the three books we had left in our box) to whichever kid managed to crack the code first.

This plan underwent a slight change at the last minute when we learned that one of the niblings was bringing their girlfriend along for Christmas. Since we didn't want her to feel left out, we decided to wrap up one of our three extra books and add it to the mix. We didn't have three more $5 bills between us, so instead we enclosed a $5 and a $10 and changed the secret message to "Read a book for Christmas, eh?" (He gave them the additional hint that the addition of the eighth book had made the message Canadian.) To randomize the order in which kids would choose books, he gave each of them a state quarter and had them go in alphabetical order by state.

By nearly all measures, this exchange was a great success. All eight kids ended up with books they liked, and they had great fun choosing books, stealing each other's selections, and solving the riddle. Since they all worked together to find the solution, Brian just offered the two extra books to the group as a whole, along with the additional cash prize of a $2 bill he had in his wallet that he knew he'd never be able to bring himself to spend. And with all seven books being secondhand (and five of the seven wrapped in reused wrapping paper), they were eco-friendly gift choices as well.

The one area in which this gift idea fell down slightly was on the frugality front. When you add together the $15 cash hidden in each book, the $53.52 we spent on the books themselves, the $2 additional prize, and the $2 worth of state quarters he doled out as tokens, the total cost of the book exchange was $177.52, or $22.19 per kid. That may not sound like much, but it's more than the average amount we typically spend on gifts, many of which are usually secondhand or homemade. Adding the books plus cash to our gift list made this our most expensive holiday season yet by a significant margin. And based on the kids' reactions, I don't think the hidden cash made the books that much more exciting as a present than they would have been on their own. So I'm hoping we haven't set a standard with these gifts that we'll now be expected to live up to in future years.

The other gift exchange was the brainchild of my mother-in-law. She had done a Yankee swap with us last year, using a variety of small but useful gifts (the most coveted present was a set of earbuds, but we were equally happy with the giant box of brownie mix we ended up with), and it was such a hit that the kids specially requested some version of the same thing this year. So she obliged, but with a twist: She called this year's gift exchange "the heritage edition." She wrapped up one box for each family member, each containing some heirloom item that had been part of the family for some time. Some of these items dated back to my husband's childhood, some to his parents' childhood, and some went back several generations. Some of them—such as a big milk can that used to store all the family's gloves, hats, and scarves next to the door—were too big to fit in boxes, so she instead wrapped up a small trinket to represent the actual gift. And each box also contained a card outlining the provenance of that particular item and its place in the family history.

Rather than randomize the order, she had us choose boxes in reverse order by age, starting with our 13-year-old nephew and working our way up the line to Brian, her firstborn. Once we'd each opened one box, we had the opportunity to trade with each other to get each item to the person who had most interest in it. The family heirlooms included old quilts, whimsical pieces of porcelain, one grandfather's old slide rule, and another grandfather's truly hardcore kite-flying kit, complete with two large kites, a massive reel, and thousands of feet of string. I drew a vintage set of stainless-steel drafting tools that had once belonged to Brian's engineer grandfather (still in mint condition, though the case was damaged), but swapped it for an antique hat rack that's sitting beside the desk where I'm typing this now. And the youngest nibling ended up with his great-great-grandmother's old "potato bug" mandolin—an instrument he had never played before, but on which he was doing a creditable rendition of "Rocky Road to Dublin" within ten minutes of picking it up.

This gift exchange was even more ecofrugal than ours. The gifts themselves didn't cost a cent, yet they were all more meaningful to the recipients than something from a store could ever be. And as one niece slyly pointed out, the exchange also helped our in-laws clear some unused stuff out of their home—a nice little bonus gift for them.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all an ecofrugal new year!

Yard-sale haul 2021

After being called off in 2020 on account of the pandemic, the annual Highland Park town-wide yard sale returned this year in all its glory. The planners even added a new twist: this year, people who for some reason couldn't host sales on their own property had the option of booking a space in the big downtown parking lot where our Friday farmers' market takes place in the summer. So Brian and I knew as we planned our weekend excursions that we could count on finding a good cluster of sales in one spot there.

Although we weren't hunting for any large items at this year's sales, there were a few smaller items I was on the lookout for. One was shoes of all kinds, since I currently have multiple pairs in my closet that are either due or seriously overdue for replacement (and as regular readers will know, finding shoes is always a struggle for me). And although I knew it was a long shot, I hoped I might chance on a copy of The Weekend Garden Guide for a friend who has recently acquired his first house and is planning to plant his first garden. Other than that, we were just keeping our eyes peeled for anything that looked like a good bargain, either for ourselves or as a holiday gift for anyone on our list.

And on this score, I'd say we did pretty well. On Saturday, we started out on the north side, working our way up one avenue and down another before crossing town to visit the market area and the cluster of sales that show up every year along Felton Avenue. We were out for about three hours all told and came home with the haul you see here:

• Two shirts for me. One is a practical plaid that can be worn as a layering piece; the other is a more fanciful lacy blouse that can be incorporated into period costumes.
• 
  One pair of hiking boots in a boys' size 5 1/2. That's actually a little big for me, but they're wearable and intact, and that's more than I can say for any of the three other pairs of winter boots I currently have at home. These can definitely take the place of my old Timberland hiking boots, which I was keeping around at this point solely for grubby outdoor jobs. And if I can't find a more appropriate pair of winter boots by December, they may end up becoming my everyday shoes this winter.
• Four books. One of them, a Ngaio Marsh mystery, is for our own enjoyment. The other three are fantasy novels we have already read and plan to present to one or more of our niblings.
• Two board games. Some of the sellers in the market area turned out to be not homeowners getting rid of stuff, but vendors who are normally there on Fridays. One of these stalls belonged to The Moonladies, two sisters who used to run a local gift and toy store. After losing their premises last year, they've been making do with a booth in the market, and they had taken advantage of yard-sale weekend to unload some clearance merchandise. The prices were much higher than you'd normally expect to pay at a yard sale, but still well below retail. Brian picked up one board game there, which we won't name since it's likely to be a gift for someone who reads this blog. We also found another small game — suitable for a stocking stuffer, perhaps — on a table full of items marked "free."
• Two bottles of masala sauce from the Moonladies booth. We usually make sauces from scratch, but Brian calculated that the marked-down price was approximately what we'd pay for the ingredients for a similar sauce. And anyway, it was a way to support a local business.
• A fold-up camping chair (the big blue thing in the background). We already had one of these that had come in handy at various outdoor events, and picking up this one gives us a matched pair.
  
• A bracelet (not visible in photo) that will make a nice gift for a niece.
• An alarm clock. This was another freebie. Brian grabbed it even though it was held together with a rubber band because he already had an identical clock that was broken, and he thought he might be able to scavenge the parts from it to repair the old one.
• A replacement seat for Brian's bike. He nearly didn't buy this, arguing that he didn't really need it because the one he has now isn't falling apart that fast. But eventually he saw the logic of securing a replacement now for $3, rather than having to buy a brand-new one when this one finally gives up the ghost.
  

By the time we'd collected all this, we were feeling pretty footsore, so we decided not to go out again after lunch. Instead we spent the afternoon running errands at actual stores, picking up food for ourselves and the kitties.

Sunday morning we ventured out again, heading up to the far north edge of the town to take in a different set of sales. As usual, the sales weren't nearly as thick on the ground on Sunday as they had been on Saturday. Some sellers who had signed up for both days had packed it in after Saturday, and even some who had signed up for Sunday only apparently decided not to bother setting up shop at all. So after about two and a half hours, we came home with only three items:

• A bag full of apples. We didn't buy these, but scavenged them near the home of a neighbor with several large apple trees. The trees had been picked clean to about the height that could be reached with a standard ladder, but a lot of the fruit on the higher branches had fallen off onto the ground and had been left to rot. Most of the apples were too damaged to eat, but we gleaned enough intact ones to fill up one of our reusable produce bags. And, as we discovered later when we cut one up to eat with our lunch, they're very good apples. (Maybe next year we can work out a deal with this neighbor to swap some of them for some of our plums.)
  
  
• A board game called "Fog of Love," which looked amusing enough to risk a dollar on.
• A book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber. Books about money are an interest of mine, and I read enough of this one to confirm that it looked both interesting and intelligible to an ordinary reader.
  
• Yet another alarm clock identical to the one we got on Saturday, except that this one was clearly in working condition. Brian felt a bit silly picking up the same clock again, but it was exactly what he wanted and it was only a dollar, so he decided it would be even more silly to pass it over.
  

The total amount we spent across both days of sales was $53.87, with most of that going to the Moonladies. It's more than we usually spend at these sales, but it enabled us to check at least three people off our holiday gift list, as well as providing several handy and/or amusing items for our own use. And since at least one of those items (the boots) was something that I absolutely needed, and that probably would have cost at least $53.87 to buy new, I consider everything else we bagged over the course of the weekend to be pure gravy.

Money Crashers: More holiday articles

It looks like we can add the winter holidays to the list of events this year that are going to be, if not ruined, at least dramatically altered by the pandemic. So far, our Passover Seder, our May Day morning gathering, and our entire weekend of Thanksgiving festivities have all become Zoom meetings, and now Hanukkah and Christmas are going to be the same.

Since most people around the country are now in this same boat, I was a little wary when my editor at Money Crashers suggested an update of my five-year-old article on holiday entertaining. I pointed out that it probably wouldn't get much traffic this year, since not that many people are going to be inclined to throw holiday parties (and those who are probably shouldn't be encouraged). I proposed delaying that update for next year and, instead, doing a new article on ways to celebrate the holidays with family and friends during a pandemic.

This is that article. It offers a total of 25 suggestions on COVID-safe celebrations, grouped into three main categories: activities you can enjoy with just the immediate family, things to do outdoors, and ways to connect virtually. Across these three categories, I manage to suggest alternatives for nearly every part of a typical Christmas season, from visiting Santa at the mall to going caroling to opening stockings on Christmas morning. (We're planning to do virtual stockings with the family ourselves, and I'm cherishing a secret hope that the family will like it enough to suggest we go with smaller presents in future years as well.)

25 Fun & Frugal Family Activities to Safely Celebrate Christmas With Kids 

To go with this new article, I've also got freshly updated versions of three of my existing articles on holiday gift shopping:

23 Best Christmas Gift Ideas for Your Boyfriend (on Every Budget)

21 Best Christmas Gift Ideas for Your Girlfriend (on Every Budget)

31 Best Gift Ideas for Foodies (on Every Budget)

Hope these tips help you to enjoy the holidays with your family and friends as completely as social distancing allows.

Money Crashers: Holiday gift article updated

Just a quick note here to let you know my Money Crashers article on holiday gift-giving has been freshly updated for 2020. Most of the content is the same — ways to limit your gift list, shop secondhand, make homemade gifts, and so on — but there's some new content about how holiday sales will look during the pandemic. Read it here: 5 Ways to Save Money on Holiday Gifts for Your Friends & Family

Cheap tools for role-playing games, part 2

This year for my birthday, Brian took me to The Only Game in Town in Somerville, the closest thing we have these days to a local game store. We were there not to shop for games, however, but to pre-order the new Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, an official Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) guide based on the setting of our favorite show in any medium, Critical Role. We have been Critters (the cute name for fans of the show) for several years and already have the earlier campaign guide based on the show, so as soon as I heard about this new one, that was the only birthday gift I really wanted. (We could have ordered it online, but Matt Mercer, the creator of this imaginary world, urged all Critters to buy it from their neighborhood game stores if possible, and, well, we don't argue with Mercer.) We can go back to pick up the book as soon as it comes out in mid-March.

Then, for Valentine's Day, Brian followed up by presenting me with this card (S.W.A.K. stands for "Sealed with a Kobold"):

And inside, it said this:

In short, just as he promised me a rose garden four years ago, this year he was promising me something even better: a D&D campaign based on the Wildemount setting.

Of course, he can't really start planning this campaign until we actually have the new book, so it will take a while for this gift to come to fruition. But he's already started planning ahead by coming up with some improvements to the paper minis he designed for our last, sadly short-lived D&D campaign. Those minis were printed out on a PDF, "laminated" with packing tape, and then placed in stands made from little binder clips. They were cheap and compact, but they had some shortcomings. First of all, it was a fair amount of work to print out and laminate all the monster minis that might potentially be needed for a given game session — and even with all that work, you couldn't be sure of having every mini you needed. If the druid decides to turn into a rhinoceros, or the wizard polymorphs one of her enemies into a snail, it's unlikely you'll have that particular image ready to hand. Also, while the pieces of paper could be scaled up to represent larger creatures, the big binder clips weren't all that much larger than the small ones, so the amount of space the minis took up on the board didn't really reflect the creatures' actual size.

So for this new campaign, he's decided to go with a different, equally cheap and simple design. The minis are still printed out on paper, but they're now simply folded over and taped to a flat, round base of some sort. For these sample minis he made, he used pennies for the humans, which are size Medium in game terms; a poker chip for the horse, which is size Large; and the lid from an empty jar of peanuts for the dragon, size Huge. Should he need to make larger or smaller creatures, he could find appropriately scaled, inexpensive bases for them as well. The lid from a peanut butter jar would probably work for a Gargantuan creature (the largest in the game), while little sequins could work for Small and Tiny ones.

These new minis are less sturdy than the old ones, but since most of the monsters in a game only show up once, they don't actually have to hold up well over time. And they have several advantages over the old design:

1. They're easy to assemble. All that's required is a single piece of tape, doubled over (or a piece of double-sided tape, if you have it) to attach the printed pieces to the bases. And once you're done with a monster, you can disassemble it just as quickly to reuse the base for something else. And you still have the option of laminating the minis you use for your PCs (player characters), which have to last through multiple games, while using plain paper for the others.

2. They're compact. The flat bases used for these minis take up even less room in a box than the binder-clip bases used for the others, and much less room than three-dimensional commercial minis.

3. They're appropriately sized. Each of these minis has a round base that takes up the appropriate amount of space on the battle map for a creature of its size, unlike the binder-clip bases for the old ones. This makes it much easier to visualize, for instance, how many PCs can surround and attack the dragon at once.

4. You can create them on the fly. If you find you need a mini that you don't happen to have, you can just grab a blank one, draw a little image on it (with a label, if your drawing isn't good enough to be identifiable) and tape it to a base. The little "Sir Stick" that Brian has added to the collection above is an example.

5. This is perhaps the best feature of all: You can write directly on the minis. This has all kinds of useful applications. For instance, if you have a whole bunch of identical monsters, you can number them, so that you can easily tell which monster is attacking or being attacked by which PC. With his old minis, Brian would often add numbers to the PDF if he was printing out, say, a horde of skeletons, but this was a bit of a pain to do; with these new ones, you can add the numbering on the spot. You can also use the base of the mini to keep track of any conditions affecting a creature, such as "poisoned" or "restrained." (With laminated PC minis, you can add notations like this with a dry-erase marker.) And, if a creature is flying, you can use a pencil to mark just how high the creature is off the ground, so you don't need to contrive elaborate "flying stands" to raise the minis off the board.

6. However, if you prefer to use a flying stand, these round minis fit very neatly on top of a simple, inverted drinking glass, as shown here with the dragon. Because the glass is clear, you can see the terrain of the board through it and even put other minis under it if they want to attack from below.

For each game session, Brian can create pages with all the minis he expects to need in Inkscape, a free page-layout program. (Here's a sample.) However, his ultimate goal is to come up with some sort of script, perhaps in Python, that can create them automatically. If this works, all he'll have to do is provide the images he wants to use, the number of each creature to print, and the size they should be, and the script will generate the PDFs for him, ready to print.

With these printable minis, his picture-frame battle map, his homemade cardboard GM screen, his turn order cards, and his turn and ability cards, Brian has all the tools he needs to create a memorable Wildemount campaign. Now all we need is the book...and, ideally, some players who can make it to a game session more regularly than once a month.

Money Crashers: Two Valentine pieces

Four years ago, I wrote a piece for Money Crashers on affordable gifts and activities for Valentine's Day. This year, the editors decided it was time to update it — but instead of just revising the old piece, they asked me to split it into two, one on affordable dates and one on affordable gifts. The first of these was published three weeks ago, and the second was all ready for publication when the editor suddenly got back to me with a request to split it yet again, this time into a piece on gifts "for her" and one on gifts "for him."

I didn't quite see the point of this, since (a) I'd already done a pair of gender-specific gift guides for Christmas, and (b) with society these days moving toward a more fluid idea of gender, there's no real reason to draw a rigid line between girl gifts and guy gifts. But according to my editor, there's still a lot of search traffic out there for Valentine's day gifts "for him" and "for her," and we have to give people what they want to stay competitive.

So, with some reluctance, I've produced the requisite two pieces on romantic, budget-friendly gifts: 7 Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Her (on a Budget) and 9 Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Him (on a Budget). I've done my best, at least, to avoid extreme gender stereotypes; I didn't want my piece for men to red like so many other gendered gift guides, which one of our editors summed up as "He Frank. Frank like meat. Frank like beer. Frank live in mancave." I've tried to go for a more nuanced approach ("Frank study art history. Frank have blog to share his haiku") and avoid making any assumptions about the gender of the reader. If I've done my job right, ladies seeking gifts for their wives, or men for their husbands, should find these pieces just as useful as heterosexual couples.

Money Crashers: Two kid-themed articles

The new articles on Money Crashers just keep popping. Today, two articles on gift ideas for kids that didn't quite make it in time for the holiday season hit the site. The first, 15 Best Magazine Subscriptions for Kids of All Ages, names the best magazines for different age groups — preschool, primary school, tweens, and teens — based on recommendations from parents, booksellers, and educators. Getting your kids hooked on one of these magazines (such as Cricket, which I avidly read from ages 6 through 16) is a great way to give them the gift of a lifelong love of reading, which will stand them in good stead in school and throughout their lives.

The second article, 13 Subscription Gift Boxes for Kids That Keep on Giving, is about subscriptions of a different sort: those monthly boxes that give you a new surprise treat every month. Personally, I've never found one of these I considered to be a good value for me as an adult, but I can see how they could make great gifts for kids. Instead of giving a child just one toy, which that may or may not be a hit, you can give them a whole new surprise to open to each month. If one of them turns out to be less than exciting, perhaps the next will be better — plus they get the pleasure of anticipating the next one all month long. These 13 subscription boxes — featuring child-friendly clothing, books, toys, and educational activities — are parents' favorites.

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.

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.

Money Crashers: Graduation Gift Ideas on a Budget

Graduation season is in full swing. Rutgers had its commencement last weekend, causing us to rearrange our driving plans to give New Brunswick as wide a berth as possible, and we'll have to make similar adjustments next month for our local high school's graduation. Luckily for us, we don't actually have to fight our way through the traffic to attend any of these events, since all our relatives and close friends are either safely through school or still a few years away from graduation. 

But we've both attended our share of graduations in our time, and along with all the other arrangements, there's always one troubling question: "What would make a good gift?" This is an even tougher question to answer when you're on a tight budget. Normally, if you're really stumped, you can just punt and give cash or a gift card—but if all you can squeeze out of your budget is $20, or even less, you end up looking cheap as well as unimaginative.

My latest Money Crashers post is an attempt to address this dilemma. I've suggested 18 gifts appropriate for different types of grads—high school or college age, male or female—at prices ranging from under $20 to nearly $100. You'll find ideas for practical gifts like food and housewares, sentimental gifts like flowers and framed pictures, and just-for-fun gifts like a board game or tickets to an event.

Unfortunately, I realize this post will come a little too late for some of you. I wrote it back in March, thinking that would be plenty of time to get it published before May, but apparently I underestimated how long the editing process would take. So if you had to attend a college graduation this year, it's probably over already. But most high school graduations, at least, are still about a month off, so I hope it's in time to be helpful to some of you.

18 Graduation Gift Ideas for Her & Him on a Budget

A birthday request

Many, if not most, of the best birthday and holiday gifts Brian has given me over the years are the ones he made himself. Indeed, the very first present he ever gave me was this picture he drew for my 27th birthday, before we were even officially dating. It hung in the bathroom at my old apartment in Princeton, moved to the hallway in our apartment in Highland Park, and now hangs downstairs in the game room over the "fireplace."

Since then, he's given me many more gifts of DIY items for the house and yard, such as a glassware rack to display a collection of stemware inherited from my Auntie Grace...

...a set of picture frames for my birthday five years back, to display a few ceramic tiles inherited from my grandmother and his...

...a custom made knife-block insert for our kitchen drawer three birthdays ago...

...the new rosebush he planted for me for Valentine's Day in 2016, and the patio extension he built to house it...

...and, biggest of all, the set of bifold doors he finished and installed as a birthday gift for me two years ago.

So this month, as my birthday was approaching again, Brian asked me if there was anything he could make for me as a present, since those gifts tend to work out better than anything from a store. And after some consideration, I said there was: a cover for the AC unit in the living room.

This is a room-sized air conditioner, similar to a portable window unit, except that it's permanently installed through the wall. We hardly ever use it—maybe once or twice a summer, if that—but we still have to look at it all summer long, and it isn't exactly pretty. In the winter, we cover it so it doesn't let in the cold outdoor air, draping a flexible plastic cover like this over the outside portion of the unit and a padded cloth one like this over the inside part. With the cloth on, the air conditioner isn't quite as obtrusive as it is in the summertime, but it still isn't exactly sightly. And since the cloth isn't sized exactly right to fit the unit, it doesn't do that great a job of insulating either. We've tried filling in the gaps with cotton batting, but it tends to droop and peep out around the edges of the fabric, which makes it look even sloppier.

We've looked for something more permanent to cover the air conditioner that would be both more practical and nicer-looking, but all we've ever been able to find online was quilted fabric covers like the one we have now. Brian has been talking for several years about building a permanent cover out of wood, but he's never gotten around to it, and I eventually realized that he probably never would get around to it unless something happened to push it to the top of his to-do list. So it seemed like the perfect request for my...ahem...(mumbling) 45th birthday.

Of course, like the bifold doors, this is a project that will take some time to complete, so I knew it wouldn't be done in time for my actual birthday. However, he did start drawing up some sketches for it during my birthday week, and that weekend we went out to Lowe's and bought some supplies for it. We bought one sheet of 4-foot-square birch plywood (which we had to cut into two pieces to get it into the car), two 3-foot hardwood dowels, and a box of wood screws, for a total of about $22.60. In addition to these, Brian plans to use a couple of longer wood pieces he already had around the shop to build a bracket to hang the thing on, and some small nails.

His design is basically a simple wooden box, slightly larger than the air conditioner itself. To hang it, he plans to secure a long piece of wood to the wall right over top of the AC unit and let the box hang from that. Eventually, he plans to buy a little corner molding to finish off the edges and make it look nicer, but we didn't get that on this trip because we weren't sure yet what we'd need (or whether it would all fit in the car). We're still discussing how we want to finish the outside of it. The options are:

1. Paint it the same color as the wall, so it will blend in and be unobtrusive. However, even if we disguise it in this way, it will still be noticeable, so it might not be much of an improvement over what we have.
2. Stain it and finish it to match the other wood pieces in the room. This might be a better option than trying to disguise it, but a solid block of dark-colored wood against that wall could look a bit incongruous.
3. Cover the front with something else that will look nice, like a patterned fabric. The difficulty with this option would be, first, choosing something that doesn't look too busy, and second, actually affixing it to the wood.

However, we should have plenty of time to figure out these details while Brian is busy building the box itself. Because you know how we are when it comes to DIY projects: we'd rather take our time to do a good job on a budget than either cut corners or spend a lot of money. If this project goes at our usual rate, we should have it done by the time summer rolls around...just in time to stow the box away and not actually install it until fall.

A new thrifty tradition

Last year, a little before Thanksgiving, my aunt sent around an e-mail to the family asking what everyone wanted for Hanukkah/Christmas. For herself, she requested gift cards to Macy's and Ann Taylor, since she had recently lost some weight and needed new clothes. I was nonplussed by this idea, since I'd just finished my article on sustainable clothing, which talked how today's "fast fashion" industry harms both the environment and the workers who create the garments. And I also knew, from a CNN article I'd read while working on another piece, that thrift shops have far more merchandise than they can sell. According to the article, roughly 90% of all the clothes donated to thrift shops eventually end up in the landfill. (This was the factoid that inspired my 2016 Thrift Week series on local thrift shops.)

So I proposed an alternative to my aunt: Over Thanksgiving weekend, I would take her to a local consignment shop (called Greene Street Consignment, though it's actually on Nassau Street) and buy her any item of her choice. Not only was she receptive to this idea, she enjoyed the trip so much that she bought herself three new dresses (ranging from a formal black number to a casual one in bright orange) in addition to the one I got her. She even went so far as to suggest we make this thrift-shop trip an annual event.

This year, when Thanksgiving rolled around, my aunt said that not only would she like to make the trip to the consignment shop again, my uncle would like to get in on it as well. So I proposed hitting a second thrift shop, called Nearly New, which has a larger selection of casual clothing. I thought this store would offer more options for the gents in the party, and possibly some for my sister's kids as well. (Greene Street has a limited selection of menswear, but nothing for children.) However, my aunt said she was "partial to" Greene Street, since she'd had such good luck there last year, so I suggested hitting them both.

So our little outing to Princeton turned out to be a much bigger outing, involving me and Brian, my sister, her kids, my uncle and aunt, and my (male) cousin, who popped in for the first thrift shop trip and then headed home. Unfortunately, I hadn't reckoned on just how busy the thrift stores were going to be on Black Friday. (Perhaps, subconsciously, I'd been hoping that the really big crowds wouldn't show up until Small Business Saturday.) Nearly New didn't seem overly crowded, but the few shoppers in the store were very enthusiastic, taking dozens of items into the fitting rooms—so we ended up waiting around half an hour just for my aunt to try on her items.

However, once she finally managed to get into a fitting room, she found several things she liked, including a comfy pair of shoes, a tailored blouse, a nightgown, and a crazy black sweater with feather trim around the neckline, which ended up being my holiday gift to her. Unfortunately, I neglected to bring my camera on the trip, so I didn't get a picture of it.

Luckily, I can give you a picture of what she bought for me. No, this isn't something I would normally wear, but let me explain: Brian and I will soon be starting a game of "Spirit of 77," which is a role-playing game with a 1970s theme. (You play over-the-top characters straight out of '70s films and TV shows, from "Shaft" to "The Dukes of Hazzard.") I thought it would be fun to dress in flamboyant '70s-style garb for this campaign, but I didn't have anything suitable in my closet. So I kept my eyes peeled at the thrift shop and managed to find a tunic in a vivid, flamboyant print, which I can pair with my widest-legged black trousers. To round out the outfit, I picked up a little knitted vest with crazy tufts that resemble fur (but aren't). Just $9 for both pieces, and I will be all ready to rock my new, funky look for our first game session.

We had a few other hits at the first thrift shop as well—a pair of pants for my uncle and a pink pashmina for my sister—before heading off to the second one. We had a little less luck there, as my uncle looked for a tuxedo shirt without success, and Brian tried on a green Henley shirt that proved to be too tight—but my aunt found a fabulous dress for only $42 to wear to a black-tie New Year's party she has coming up. So that part of the trip was a success as well.

All in all, I'd say this thrift shop excursion is shaping up to be an enjoyable—and ecofrugal—part of our family's Thanksgiving traditions. It's a bit disappointing that it has to cut into our time for hanging out and playing games, but then again, you can't really do that all weekend. Devoting a couple of hours to thrift-shopping on Friday afternoon makes for a nice break, after which we can get back to Boggle and Apples to Apples.

Green Gift Roundup 2016

In 2015, I never got around to doing a Green Gift Roundup for the holidays. For one thing, we didn't manage to give as many green gifts that year as we had in previous years; only about 44 percent of all the gifts we gave were secondhand, locally purchased, sustainably sourced, or energy-saving, as compared to 72 percent the previous year. Also, the green gifts we did purchase, such as books and toys, weren't the most successful gifts we gave that year. The biggest hits of all our presents were the "home spa treatment system" we got for my sister and the Dungeons & Dragons starter set we gave my oldest nephew—and while I was pleased that they liked the presents, there was really no way I could spin them as green. So I decided to let the subject drop for that year.

This year, however, things are different. We managed to get our green-gift ratio all the way back up to 69 percent of our purchases, and the most successful presents on our list were all sustainable picks in one way or another. Also, we received several presents—both large and small—that qualify as green. So I figured this year I could do at least a quick Green Gift Roundup to share which green ideas worked the best for us.

Our green holiday giving started early this year, on Thanksgiving weekend. My aunt had said that what she really needed this year was new clothing, since she'd recently dropped a size, so she was asking for gift cards to Macy's or Ann Taylor. However, I'd just finished writing my article on sustainable clothing, and I really didn't like the idea of turning around and supporting fast fashion. So I offered her an alternative proposal: while she was in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, I'd take her out to Greene Street Consignment in Princeton and buy her an item of her choice. This turned out to be a bigger success than I imagined; she had a blast trying on over-the-top party dresses for her Sister Goddess gatherings, and in addition to the dress I eventually bought her (a jazzy one-shoulder number in silver lamé), she bought three more for herself. She even suggested making the thrift shop an annual tradition.

We also bought sustainable Hanukkah and Christmas gifts for several other family members, including:

• A subscription to Yes! magazine for my mom. She often finds the news depressing (hardly a surprise) and calls me up to ask if I have any good news, so I thought a magazine filled with all good news—about the environment, social movements, and sustainable communities—was just what she needed. She hasn't received her first issue yet, as it's a quarterly, but she has already started reading and enjoying the online edition.
• Also for my mom, a book called NYPD Puzzle that we picked up at the library book sale. This is part of the Puzzle Lady series, featuring a crossword constructor and her crime-solving aunt, and it includes puzzles right in the book that provide clues to the mystery. Since my mom loves both mysteries and puzzles, it seemed right up her alley. So I told her I was giving her one present to distract her from what's going on in the world, and one to make her feel better about it.
• A pashmina shawl from the annual craft fair at the Morristown Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, where our favorite folk series is held. My sister had specifically requested pashminas this year, particularly in bright red, pink, and purple, and this one happened to have all three colors in a lush, soft fabric. Though it was a lot pricier than the ones at Target, it was also a lot nicer, and Fair Trade to boot, so I figured it was worth a splurge. And since she mentioned the "gorgeous scarf" in a recent e-mail, I guess she liked it too.
• Two books for my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. This is the same brother-in-law who, two years back, let me pick through the discards from his shelf of gardening books, so I knew he was interested in growing and preserving his own produce. So when my other brother-in-law requested a specific book on craft cider making (which I didn't get for him because someone else snapped it up), I decided it would make a good gift for this other couple. While I was at it, I threw in a second book called Drink the Harvest, which covers not only cider but also juice, tea, and mead. He only glanced at the books when he opened them, but she picked them up and became absorbed in them, so I think there's a good chance they'll get some use out of these. Maybe they'll even return the favor with a gift of home-brewed cider next year.
• Two more books for my youngest nephew. While we were in Princeton thrift-shopping, I stopped in at the library and browsed through their used-book section, where I picked up two little paperbacks from the "young readers" section: a Nate the Great mystery (one of his favorite series) and a biography of Neil Armstrong, since he's obsessed with everything to do with outer space.
• For that same nephew and his younger sister, a pair of "Magic Cloths." These are basically a homemade version of Playsilks, using low-end fabric from Jo-Ann Fabrics that we hemmed ourselves. (Well, Brian did it, actually, since I can't sew a straight seam on the machine to save my life.) I also threw in a little "instruction manual" to go with them: a poem illustrated with little stick figures (thanks again to Brian) that show all the different things a Magic Cloth can turn into: a superhero cape, a princess gown, a parachute, a pool of water, etc. I wasn't sure whether these counted as a green gift, since they're not all-natural silk like the originals—but they are a highly versatile toy that requires no electricity and encourages imaginative play. My sister said they were a "huge hit" with her kids.
• For my two craft-loving nieces, an assortment of beads that we picked up at the last town-wide yard sale. For a mere 50 cents, we got two boxes of beads: one with a variety of colorful glass beads, and one with tiny "seed beads" (which we urged our nieces not to open on the spot, since they are very easy to scatter everywhere). That should be enough to keep them in bracelets for a good few months.
• For their younger brother, the Big Book of Riddles, Puzzles, and Enigmas. This was another yard-sale find, and we weren't quite sure whom to give it to, so we picked this nephew almost at random. This turned out to be a good guess; when he opened it, his eyes lit up and he displayed the book to the entire room like Vanna White showing off a fabulous prize. He spent much of the day lying on the couch, poring over the puzzles and occasionally trying them out on his relatives. And a quiet child was a great gift for the rest of us.
• Finally, an experiential gift: a Chinese banquet on Christmas Day. This year, we weren't able to get the whole family together to open presents until the 27th, so on the 25th I offered to take those who were around—my in-laws and Brian's brother—for a traditional Jewish Christmas. Apparently, a lot of other people had the same idea, as the Formosa Seafood Buffet was packed. Afterward, we skipped the movie theater and instead went home to watch a DVD. We went with A Christmas Story, since I'd never seen it—and it turns out, that includes a memorable Chinese Christmas dinner as well.

In addition to the gifts themselves, I had the opportunity to use a few of the fabric gift bags my sister-in-law gave me in 2014. I used a couple of them for gifts to that same sister-in-law, since I knew she would use them again, and a couple for other people. The downside of this is that I didn't really receive any new gifts that were in fabric gift bags—so if I carry on at this rate, my stock of them will gradually disappear. I guess I'll have to get this darned sewing machine figured out so I can make some of my own.

We also received a few gifts that qualify as green. Brian's brother gifted us two bottles of mead from the local "meadery": a growler of strawberry-rhubarb mead and a smaller bottle of cherry. (The former turns out to be dry and slightly fizzy, so I'm toying with the idea of trying it in a Bellini.) His sister slipped some mysterious cardboard objects into his stocking, which turned out to be homemade fire starters made from dryer lint and candle wax stuffed into egg-carton cups. These might prove handy for the charcoal grill, or if we ever pick up the fire pit I've been toying with the idea of adding to our patio.

Her gift to me was a vegan faux-leather purse, which the salesclerk assured her was "really high quality" but was marked down because it was last year's model. This may make it the first purse I've ever owned from a brand that actually has different models for different years—but what I like about it is that it has a long strap so it can be carried cross-body fashion. A therapist I've been seeing advised me to switch to this type of purse because it would put less strain on my back and neck, so this was a particularly timely gift.

Brian received a couple of ecofrugal gifts from my family as well. My mom and my aunt both gave him silicone baking mats—something I suggested because we've been using such a lot of parchment paper lately for baking. And my sister gave him a handy multitool for bike repairs, which will make it easier for him to bike to work without carrying quite as much stuff.

Finally, during our trip to Indiana, we picked up a couple of eco-friendly items for ourselves. We visited not one, but two Goodwill stores in Indianapolis, where we found a pair of jeans for Brian and corduroys and a long-sleeved shirt for me, all for a flat $18 (including the small donation that we made to each store by rounding up to the nearest dollar). And after making sure no one else was going to give us one, we stopped by Fry's and bought ourselves a new tablet computer to replace the one that met with an accident last fall. Calling this an ecofrugal purchase is debatable, but we found after several months of going without one that there really were quite a few things we could do more easily with one, like reading online news and books from the e-library—which will mean fewer books to buy and clutter up our shelves. Yes, that's a bit of a stretch, but at the very least, it was a purchase that we thought out carefully and can be sure we won't regret. So if nothing else, it's a case of using our money wisely. (We also invested $20 in a good protective case to go with it, so this tablet won't meet with the same fate as the last one.)

And that wraps it up for our holidays. I hope yours were equally festive and green.