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.)

Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu (with bonus dessert)

I've had other things to post about the past couple of weeks, so this is my first opportunity to tell you about our new Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu with Roasted Cauliflower. Brian found this recipe on a site called Eating Bird Food while hunting for new ways to use a cheap cauliflower we'd scored toward the end of January. As usual, he made a few small changes to the recipe:

• Scaling it down from four servings to three
• Substituting canola oil for avocado oil
• Leaving out the fresh cilantro, which we didn't have (and I don't care for anyway)
• Replacing the hot chili sauce, which we also didn't have, by adding a dried hot chili to the marinade instead—and then, for fear that change would make it too fiery, dialing back the crushed red pepper to just a pinch for the two-thirds recipe

As it turned out, he needn't have worried about the heat level; the dish was mild enough that even my delicate taste buds could easily have handled more. In fact, I'd say it was bordering on bland, despite the ample amounts of onion, garlic, and ginger in it. It just seemed like it could have used a little bit more of pretty much everything. Texture-wise, the cauliflower worked better than the tofu, which seemed a little too soft and squishy for the dish. It might have worked better with some Soy Curls, which have a firmer texture closer to chicken. But given how unmemorable we both found it, it's probably not worth making a second attempt.

But that wasn't the only new vegan recipe we tried this month. Last night, as a special Valentine's Day treat, he prepared the Salted Dark Chocolate Tart from Gimme Some Oven. This rich little dessert has a gluten-free chocolate-almond meal crust filled with a dairy-free chocolate ganache made with coconut milk. It's supposed to be served with flaked sea salt on top, but Brian decided to make that part optional. Since the recipe says it makes 8 to 12 servings, Brian cut it down to one-quarter of its size for the two of us.

This dish was much more successful than the tofu. The crust was a bit crumbly and didn't come out of the pan neatly, but the ganache was creamy and delicious. Brian had his with a sprinkling of salt and found that enhanced it still more, but I chose to top mine with a generous portion of coconut whipped cream instead. This actually made it a bit less decadent, tempering the richness of the filling by stretching it out over a larger volume. We ate about half of it up while watching the last bits of Campaign Three of Critical Role, leaving us with two more small portions to enjoy tonight.

So, unlike the kung pao tofu, this dessert looks like a keeper. We might fiddle with the recipe a bit to see if we can keep the crust from sticking, but we can be sure the results will be good enough to justify the effort.

Ecofrugality is now called "underconsumption core"

Once again, I find myself riding the wave of a trend I didn't know existed. A week or so ago, I read an article in Grist about how many TikTokers are now fighting back against the consumption culture popularized by many influencers with videos about a lifestyle they call "underconsumption core." This aesthetic, according to the article, is "generally about reducing and reusing." In their videos, creators show off their reusable bags, thrift-shop visits, minimalist skincare routines, and possessions they've bought cheap and kept for decades. Doesn't this sound a lot like the sort of thing I've been posting about for the last 15 years?

Of course, when I first started this blog, there was no TikTok and "influencer" wasn't a recognized profession. So I figured, if this new platform is now providing a forum for a lifestyle I've been promoting for years, why not jump on that bandwagon? Why not whip up my own little one-minute video, set to "soothing background music," about my ecofrugal—excuse me, "underconsumption core"—habits and contribute it to the conversation? And, seeing as it's December, why not make it all about the ways we practice underconsumption during the holidays, which are normally the spendiest time of the year?

So I filmed a few little clips with my phone, edited them together in the free ClipChamp program, found a public-domain musical track on Pixabay, and posted it on both TikTok and YouTube. If you have an account on either platform, I'd appreciate your popping by there and giving it a like. If enough people seem to enjoy this first video, perhaps I'll make some more in the same vein. I've got the software more or less figured out now, and it's not like I have any shortage of material to work with.

Happy holidays to all, and to all an ecofrugal new year!

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!

Holiday decor disappointment

My simple DIY holiday decorations keep getting harder and harder to create. For years, I did just fine with just one strand of outdoor lights, some festive ribbons, and some evergreen trimmings that I picked up for free from the local Christmas tree vendors in Sears' parking lot. I'd generally tip them a buck or two, but with all the rest of the decorations reused from year to year, it was still very cheap. And since I was only putting to use what would otherwise go to waste, it was very eco-friendly as well.

Two years ago, this got more difficult. Sears had gone into bankruptcy, and the Christmas tree vendors had stopped setting up shop there. And when I searched online to see where the nearest tree vendor was, it was about a twenty-minute drive away in an area we never visit for any other reason (and would particularly avoid visiting at Christmas time). Plus there was no guarantee they'd even have evergreen trimmings available when we got there. So I scaled down my decorations a bit and made do with what I was able to trim off the one evergreen tree in our yard and the bushes that overhung our driveway from the neighbor's yard.

But this year, that option too became unavailable. Our neighbor cut down all the bushes in his yard, and the one tree in our yard couldn't possibly yield enough greenery to make any sort of show. So at this point, we could think of three options:

• Make the trek up to the nearest tree vendor, with no guarantee of finding anything;
• Shell out for pricey greenery from a local store; or
  
• Don't put up decorations.

The first two options didn't seem very ecofrugal, but the last was just too depressing, particularly after a year with so little cheer in it. So I did a little research and found that I could get a 20-foot rope of pine garland at the local supermarket for 12 bucks — not as cheap as the greenery I used to pick up from the tree vendors, but still reasonably affordable. And I thought maybe the pine garland would justify its price by being easier to work with than the individual branches that had to be carefully trimmed and fitted and bound to the railings piece by piece.

This turned out not to be the case. The long, heavy rope of pine garland was actually more unwieldy than the branches; I had to use one hand to hold the end on the railing and one to tie the ribbon on while trying to pin the rest of the bundle in place so it didn't drag the piece I was working with off the railing. Also, 20 feet proved not quite long enough to go all the way up one railing, over the door, and down the other railing, so I had to hack off two lengths for the two railings — which was a lot harder than it sounds, because the pieces of pine were attached together with sturdy wire that I had to cut through,

But the biggest problem with the pine garland is that it just doesn't look as good as the ad hoc arrangements I used to make with miscellaneous evergreens. Because I was trying to work with a pre-made rope, I couldn't arrange the individual branches to cover over bare spots, so I was left with stretches of exposed wood with no greenery. Also, because I was trying to run the garland up one railing and down the other, the pine needles are all pointing in opposite directions on the two sides. And worst of all, the pine dries out a lot faster than the assorted branches of yew, spruce, cypress, and whatnot that I used to work with. It's only been up there for two weeks, and already it's starting to look brown and drab — not cheery and festive at all.

All in all, I can't really consider the $12 I spent on this pine garland to be money well spent. I'm not prepared to tear it all down, but I'm certainly not inclined to shell out another $12 for the same thing next year.

Fortunately, there may be other alternatives. For one, I discovered this year that there were Christmas tree vendors setting up shop at our local farmers' market, starting the Friday after Thanksgiving. They didn't seem to have a pile of discarded trimmings anywhere, but I could try going up to them next year and asking if they have any they'd like to get rid of. The downside of this plan is that, first, they might say no; and second, the farmers' market doesn't open until 11am on Friday, so if we tried to make it there the Friday after Thanksgiving we wouldn't be able to join the rest of the family in Hopewell until noon at least. We'd either lose out on a couple of hours of Thanksgiving fun or have to wait another week to get our decorations up.

But there is another possibility. My parents live on a half-acre lot with a whole bunch of spruce trees on it, and we could probably glean more than enough greenery from them to decorate our house without doing the trees any damage. And since we're always there for Thanksgiving weekend anyway, all we'd have to do is bring our clippers with us, and maybe some sort of bag to store the branches in.

If we could manage this, it would bring our holiday decorations back to their original ecofrugal roots. We'd be using only local, sustainably harvested evergreens, and paying nothing at all for them. And with our new battery-powered LED lights (running off rechargeable batteries) both outdoors and indoors, they'd be even more festive and easier to set up. The best of all ecofrugal worlds.

Starting the year off light

Tomorrow night is the start of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish year. Most years, I mark this occasion by going to services with my parents at their synagogue (either with both of them in the evening, or with just Mom in the daytime). But this year, the synagogue remains officially closed; the only in-person event will be an outdoor barbecue, and the service itself will be entirely virtual for the second year in a row. I can't log into that virtual service from home since I'm not officially a member, and we agreed that it would be a bit silly for me to go to my parents' house just so we could watch it together on the computer. So I need to find some other way to commemorate the occasion.

Now, one ritual associated with Rosh Hashanah is Tashlich, or "casting off." You go to a nearby body of water, ideally a flowing river or stream, and throw bread crumbs into it to symbolize casting off your sins. (Actually, it's apparently more popular these days to throw leaves or pebbles, since bread crumbs aren't good for the wildlife.) If that word "sins" has too much baggage for your taste, you can think of it instead as ridding yourself of anything unwanted or harmful in your life: bad habits, unwelcome thoughts, anything that's weighing you down and keeping you from living the kind of life you aspire to.

I tried taking part in this ritual last year, going down to the park and attempting to toss crumbs off the dock into the Raritan River, but the area was crammed with members of a local synagogue who'd come for the same reason. So this year, I'm taking a different approach: I'm going to rid myself of excess baggage by Freecycling it.

I'd already made a start last week by listing our old cordless phone, which we replaced earlier this year because it had become unreliable after we switched back to Verizon. (Occasionally, for no apparent reason, it simply didn't ring when a call came in.) Only one person replied to that post, saying only "I'm interested," but apparently they weren't interested enough to respond when I suggested they fix up a time for pickup. (Why do people do that?) I followed up by listing it on my local Buy Nothing Group, which I've recently joined via Facebook, but so far no takers there either.

But I refused to let this setback daunt me. Today I went through the drawer in our bathroom that serves as an overflow medicine chest and purged two bottles of skincare products and three bottles of mineral supplements that hadn't worked for me. Within minutes of listing them, I already had inquiries about three of these items, and one of them is already gone. That's a promising start.

While I'm at it, I'm doing my best to clear a backlog of other stuff, too. Catching up on long-overdue cleaning tasks, like washing all the glasses on my stemware rack (and the rack itself). Getting up-to-date with all my various medical checkups. And most importantly, finally getting around to donating the remainder of the stimulus money we received during the pandemic. Since we didn't need this money ourselves, we've been trying to donate it in ways that support the community, such as funding a local summer outdoor movie series and helping to Kickstart the coolest bookmobile ever. So today, I sent a message to inquire about donating the $1500 or so we have left to a fund for local businesses. (I'd tried inquiring about this before, but got no response, so this time I decided to try filling out the online form as if I were a business seeking funds and explaining that my "proposed project" is to support other businesses.)

Between freeing myself of things I don't need and getting money to businesses that do need it, I'd say I'm getting the year off to a good start. I may not be exactly free of sin, but I think actively doing something good is probably more helpful than making a promise — which may not even last the whole year — to quit doing something bad.

Recipe of the Month: Oyster Mushroom "Steak"

I often have trouble figuring out what to do for Brian on Valentine's Day. Because both Hannukah and his birthday fall in December, by the time February comes around, I've used up all my gift ideas for him, and he's not that big a fan of presents anyway. Doing things together is more his speed, but going out (for dinner, a show, even shopping) isn't really an option right now. Outdoor activities are still okay, but February isn't a great time for them. And all our favorite at-home activities (watching TV together, doing puzzles, having me read aloud to him) are things we do all the time anyway, so they're not that special.

This year, however, I happened to hit on a good idea more or less by chance. I forget exactly how we got onto the subject, but I was asking him whether he missed eating meat (something he hasn't had in a while, since we have entirely stopped cooking it at home, and we haven't been able to eat out for over a year now). He said he didn't mind missing the occasional burger, especially since he usually plumps for the Impossible Burger these days anyway, but he admitted that the idea of a well-cooked steak had not lost its appeal. However, when I asked him if he'd care to spring for a free-range beefsteak to cook at home, he demurred. Then I recalled the oyster mushrooms we'd had at the vegan restaurant we visited on my birthday last year, and how he and my dad both said they tasted a lot like steak. So I suggested some of those for a special Valentine's Day meal, and that he agreed to right away.

I did a quick search on "oyster mushroom steak" and found a simple recipe on the Plant-Based On a Budget blog. It recommended a single large oyster mushroom for each serving, grilled in a pan for three to four minutes on each side and served with a tahini-lemon sauce, accompanied by roasted potato wedges and cherry tomato halves. February not being the ideal time of year for cherry tomatoes, we skipped that part of the meal in favor of some frizzled leeks à la Molly Katzen, but otherwise we stuck to the recipe as provided.

We already had some potatoes, and we picked up the leeks and the oyster mushrooms at H-Mart. We found several kinds of oyster mushrooms, in fact, and we got into a bit of a debate in the store about which variety was most appropriate for the recipe. There were large king oyster mushrooms, dark clusters of black oyster mushrooms, and large clumps labeled as oyster mushrooms with no adjective attached. Not knowing which variety the blogger had in mind, we eventually settled on the unqualified oyster mushrooms as the safest bet. A half-pound package cost us $5 — about as much as we'd have paid for real steak, but without the hefty carbon footprint.

We then had another debate at home about what constituted one oyster mushroom, the recommended portion size, since there were a whole bunch of little caps on each stem. Eventually we decided we'd just cook half the package for the two of us, and if that wasn't enough, it wouldn't take long to do the rest. We also cooked one potato apiece and frizzled an entire leek, since we knew we'd have no trouble using up any leftovers. (Frizzled leeks are great in soup or pasta, or you can just snack on them like chips.) The entire lot — shrooms, potatoes, and leeks — made one overflowing plateful, which we split between the two of us.

The cooked mushrooms certainly didn't look much like steak, but they had a satisfyingly chewy, "meaty" texture and a rich, savory flavor — particularly the bits that had stuck to the pan a bit and got extra browned. In fact, Brian ended up tossing the rest of the mushrooms in the pan and cooking them on extra high heat to get them as torched as possible. This produced a lot of smoke, but also produced extra flavorful mushrooms. Brian's observation was that the flavor seemed to get better the browner they were, but cooking them too thoroughly tended to dry them out and make them tough, so it was a bit of a balancing act to optimize both flavor and texture. The potatoes and leeks both complemented the mushrooms well (better than tomatoes would have, in my opinion). As for the tahini-lemon sauce, it was fine, but neither of us thought it did much to enhance the mushrooms, and we probably wouldn't bother with it another time.

It's been over twenty-five years since I last tasted steak (and even that was only what passed for it at my college dining center), so I couldn't really say how the oyster mushrooms compared to it. When I put the question to Brian, the more recent carnivore, he said, "A mushroom is not a steak, but then again, a steak is not a mushroom." In other words, the mushrooms weren't just like steak, but they had virtues of their own that steak couldn't offer. They couldn't fill you up like a big hunk of animal protein, but they had a stronger natural flavor, even in the parts that weren't all that well browned. And it was a flavor that both Brian, a once-fond fan of beef, and I, who never much cared for it, could enjoy.

So now for the thousand-dollar question (or in this case, the $9.98 per pound question): would we make this again? Well, based on the price, I don't think it's something we'd want to have on a regular basis. But then, I imagine most meat-eaters on a budget wouldn't choose to pay $10 a pound for real steak on a regular basis, either. So I think we can look on this dish the same way a meat-eater could view the cow-based alternative: a nice treat for special occasions. Especially when followed up with a nice lemon pudding cake, coconut whipped cream, and Critical Role.

Why my New Year's resolution for 2021 is to start sharing good news

Right now, it seems like basically all the news is bad. It's not good anywhere in the world, but the U.S. in particular seems to be a Russian nesting doll of disaster: the crisis of an angry mob storming the Capitol wrapped in the crisis of a disputed election wrapped in the yearlong twin crises of a global pandemic and the biggest depression since the Great one, all wrapped in the decades-long crisis of a looming climate disaster that could literally kill us all. No one's even paying attention to the biggest threats right now because they're too busy dealing with the most immediate ones. So many terrible things happened in 2020 that the word of the year chosen by users of Dictionary.com was "unprecedented." The Oxford English Dictionary couldn't even settle on a single word of the year, instead naming an assortment of words like "Blursday," "covidiots," and "doomscrolling," which has taken the place of what we used to call reading the news.

The thing about that last one is, dwelling on bad news is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. As a recently replayed Hidden Brain podcast pointed out, both social media and conventional media have focused excessively on terrible stories that spark outrage, because that's what attracts the most clicks and likes. Unfortunately, it's also what sows dissension and stokes the fires of partisan rancor, vitriol, conspiracy theories, and hatred — all resulting in outbreaks of violence that make for more bad news, more doomscrolling, and more division.

How can we break the cycle?

I'm not sure, but the best idea I could come up with was this: start sharing good news.

Instead of automatically clicking, liking, and sharing every horrible story that you see, try clicking, liking, and sharing the good ones. Sure, there aren't as many of them out there; because we've been trapped in the doomscrolling cycle so long, they aren't as likely to show up in your social media feed or even on the front page of your local newspaper. But they are out there. Every issue of the Christian Science Monitor features a story about someone who's doing good in the world, and Reasons to Be Cheerful serves up a steady diet of nothing but good news, every week. They're mostly small-scale, local stories about one city, one company, one project — but at least they're something to counter the constant scrolling of doom. And the more of these stories we all click, like, and share, the more popular they will become, and the more incentive both social media and mainstream media will have to offer up more of the same.

So my New Year's resolution for 2021 (along with continuing to try new vegan recipes each month) is to share good news when I find it. If it's good news about the environment, or about money, I'll share it on this blog. If not, I'll share it via social media or email with my family and friends. Basically, I'll just do my best to pass on a little bit of much-needed hope by whatever means I have to hand.

I've started off already this weekend. Just now, I posted on my local Nextdoor group to tell everyone about a local store employee who went the extra mile for me and Brian, rather than complaining about one who was rude or unhelpful. And to my mom, I passed along this summary from Reasons to be Cheerful of the 112 best things that happened, even amid all the chaos, in 2020 — from the expansion of renewable energy worldwide to the virtual eradication of homelessness in the third-largest city in Illinois to the success of community policing in Camden, right here in my home state of New Jersey.

So watch this space for more good news in 2021. If nothing else, it'll give me something to write about when there's no particular news to share in my ecofrugal life — and if it forces me to go searching for positive stories, so much the better.

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: 10 Ways to Shop for a Cause and Give Back This Holiday Season

Gift shopping and charitable giving are two things I normally like to keep separate. I know many people think "a donation to charity in your name" is a good present, and maybe for the right person it could be, but to me, a gift to a worthy cause is not at all the same thing as a gift to an individual, chosen specially for that individual. If someone gives me a "gift" of a donation in my name, I always feel like, "Well, that was very nice of you, but it isn't really a gift for me, was it? It's a gift to the charity, and possibly a gift to you because it makes you feel good about yourself, but if what I really wanted most was to see this charity receive money, I'd give it myself."

However, there are ways to support a charity and give a gift at the same time, without compromising either. By knowing where and how to shop, you can direct a portion of your gift-giving dollars to a worthy cause — so both the cause and the recipient get something that will make them happy.

My latest Money Crashers article (an update of a piece by a former writer) outlines several ways to do this, including:

• Charity portals such as iGive and Amazon Smile
• Various types of vendors that support charitable causes
• Getting free or cheap items for donation through extreme couponing
• Specific products that come with a charitable donation
• Charitable credit cards
• Rounding up for charity at the register

And it concludes with some tips on how to make charity begin at home, or at least close to it, by using your shopping dollars to support local businesses, many of which are struggling during the pandemic. 

Brian and I have already put this advice to use for our own holiday shopping. Since Hanukkah and Christmas are both going to have to take place at a distance this year, we've been looking for small gifts we can ship easily — and we've already picked up several from either local businesses and several more from online vendors that donate an item to charity for every one you buy. We can't get more specific, since some of the people receiving these gifts are readers of this blog, but we think the recipients will be happy with the merchandise. And we'll feel good knowing they were gifts that gave twice — gifts that could please the people in our lives and help total strangers at the same time.

10 Ways to Shop for a Cause and Give Back This Holiday Season

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

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: 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: Best Christmas Gifts for Girlfriends and Boyfriends

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

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

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

Grow-your-own decor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm dreaming of a thrifted Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money Crashers: Holiday articles

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

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

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

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

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

My 24-hour Internet fast

It’s been many years since I fasted on Yom Kippur. Even back in the days when I did it every year, I never really believed that I was obeying a command from God or that I would be punished if I didn’t. Partly, it was a matter of cultural identity; I fasted because I was a Jew, and fasting is what Jews do on Yom Kippur. But also, I believed that on some level, it was good for me. Good for me physically, because a 24-hour fast would shrink my stomach and make me less likely to overindulge in the new year, and good for me spiritually, because going hungry for a day would make me more sympathetic to people in need.

Over the years, though, I began to have doubts about whether my yearly fast was really having the desired effect. It certainly wasn’t making me feel better physically; on the contrary, it usually left me with a throbbing headache and an uneasy stomach that didn’t want to accept the food it needed. And these discomforts, far from making me feel spiritually uplifted and sympathetic to all humankind, made me cranky and snappish with the humans in my immediate vicinity. I eventually reached the conclusion that fasting wasn’t doing either my body or my soul any good and quit doing it.

But I never felt entirely easy with my decision. Although I knew that fasting hadn’t done anything to make me a better person, it still felt wrong not to do something special on Yom Kippur — something that would give the day the same weight and significance it had in the lives of my ancestors back in the shtetl. So this year, as I attended the evening service with my parents, I found myself wondering: was there something else I could give up on Yom Kippur, something that really would be physically and spiritually beneficial even if it was difficult? And suddenly the answer came to me: I should go 24 hours without connecting to the Internet.

I quickly realized that doing this would be, in some ways, more of a challenge than going without food. No Internet definitely meant no work, since my job is pretty much entirely online these days — a mixture of Internet research, composing articles in Google Docs, and connecting to coworkers via Gmail, Slack and Trello. And most of the things I normally do as a break from work — checking email, answering online surveys, clicking on whatever intriguing article has popped up on Pocket — would also be off-limits. I wouldn’t be able to solve my daily cryptic crossword (downloaded from BestforPuzzles.com) over breakfast, listen to a podcast in the shower, or read the day’s top headlines from the New York Times. It would be a complete disruption of my routine.

And in a way, that was the point. An Internet fast would force me to take a break from all my daily habits, both good and bad — and in the process, step back and get a clearer look at which was which.

So, after a little initial hesitation — what about the emails I hadn’t answered that afternoon? What about other urgent messages that might come in during the day? — I decided to give it a try. And I made a further decision: as I went through my Internet-free day, I’d document it to see just how it had affected me, for good or bad.


Here's what happened.

***

Tuesday, 10 pm: Upon my return home from services, my husband Brian gets onto my computer to answer, on my behalf, the one email message I feel I can’t afford to leave dangling for the next 24 hours. He then ceremoniously disconnects the Ethernet cable from my computer to ensure that I won’t slip up and connect to the Internet without thinking about it. So now it’s official: I’m doing this.

Wednesday, 7 am: Since Brian is still going to work today, even if I’m not, the alarm wakes us at the usual time. After I take my pills and brush my teeth, I realize I’m not sure what to do with myself next. Since I can’t eat breakfast until half an hour after taking my pill, I’d normally spend the next 30 minutes checking email and printing out my morning puzzle before breakfast, but those activities are now off-limits. Instead, I pick up yesterday’s copy of the Daily Targum — a college paper I normally get only for the crossword — and actually read it.

Wednesday, 8:40 am: After Brian departs for work, I sit down and start writing this article (in TextEdit, which I can use offline). I quickly discover how much I’ve been in the habit of taking mini-breaks throughout my workday, every time I get stuck on a tricky paragraph, to check my email or play a quick game of 2048. Unable to engage in these diversions, I root around on my computer’s hard drive and unearth an old copy of Montana Solitaire, which I can play without benefit of Internet.

Wednesday, 11:10 am: I decide it’s time for a shower. Clicking on iTunes, I realize that I still have part of yesterday’s Hidden Brain podcast left over that I didn’t finish listening to, and since it’s already downloaded, I can listen to it today without breaking my Internet fast. It feels a little like cheating, but I do it. The topic of the episode is outrage: how it’s “hijacking our conversations, our communities, and our minds.” As the presenter and his guests talk about how social media, in particular, has become a constant stream of vitriol, I mentally run over all the emails that have entered my inbox over the past few days and are probably continuing to pile up this very minute. How many of them were from one political mailing list or another, shrieking about the latest travesty in the political realm and the urgent need for MORE MONEY, NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW, to combat it? All of a sudden, I feel a lot better about not being available to receive them.

Wednesday, 12 pm: Time for lunch. As my tummy rumbles, I feel thankful that I’m skipping Internet today rather than food. Then I wonder how ironic it is that not fasting is making me more appreciative about eating.

Wednesday, 1 pm: After consuming my soup, biscuit, apple, two squares of chocolate, and a chapter or two of Ngaio Marsh’s last novel, I find myself once again at loose ends. I can’t do any work, and I can’t do most of the things I normally do for play, since they all involve going online. So instead, I sit down at my computer and start putting together a scenario for “Honey Heist,” a silly little role-playing game I’ve been meaning to run for a while. This is a task I’ve never managed to find the time to work on; during the day I was always either too busy with work or allowing the wonders of the Internet to distract me from work. Apparently a day offline was the kick in the pants I needed to get started.

Wednesday, 2:20 pm: Got so absorbed in planning my Honey Heist, I didn’t even notice it was past my usual time for my afternoon walk. It's chilly and damp out, but not too cold once I get moving. Since I have no work to get back to, I feel free to take my time strolling around town, gathering fall leaves, and stopping into the store to pick up some snacks for tonight’s game.

Wednesday, 3:50 pm: Back from my walk. Take my time arranging my newly collected leaves in their basket and fixing myself a snack (hooray for not fasting). Go back to “work” on the Honey Heist.

Wednesday, 5 pm: Brian comes home from work. I ask him if he knows what time sunset is, since I can’t go back online until then (and I can’t visit Accuweather to check for myself). He checks for me and reports that sunset is at 6:27 pm, so I still have about an hour and a half to go. He also brings me a fresh copy of the Daily Targum, so I have plenty to occupy myself until then.

Wednesday, 6:40 pm: The moment of truth. Having finished dinner, I reconnect to the Internet. In the course of this one day — counting from 5:30 last night, when I left for services — I have accumulated 40 emails (not counting survey invites) across my three email accounts. These include five work-related messages, six about dance practice, four about the concert series, five concerning a friend’s request to borrow a couple of board games from us (which Brian handled for me), one about our weeknight gaming group, and two shrieking political messages. The rest are all newsletters and other trivia that don’t really require my immediate attention.

It takes an hour or more to go through all these accumulated messages, sorting them and responding as necessary. If I'd dealt with them as they came in over the course of the day, it would probably have taken at least as much time, but it would have felt less burdensome because it would have been spread out into shorter blocks of 15 minutes or less. By the time I'm done with it all, I feel almost as tired as if I'd really fasted all day, and more than ready to collapse on the couch with some Netflix (courtesy of my long-lost friend the Internet).


***

So, now that it's all over, what conclusions do I draw from my experiment?

First of all, I can say with relief that I'm not genuinely addicted to the Internet. Going without it for a whole day wasn't terribly burdensome; in some ways, it was actually quite pleasant. Being unable to work or goof off in the ways I usually do left me with time free to do things I normally wouldn't, like planning my Honey Heist, and more time to spend on offline activities I enjoy, such as reading and taking my afternoon walk, without feeling guilty about all the time I was taking away from work. It was definitely less painful than going a day without food.

That said, I have to admit that my life with the Internet is, on the whole, easier than my life without it. It really was awkward not being able to do the little things I've come to rely on: printing out my puzzle in the morning, checking the weather report, sending a quick email message. And while I didn't happen to miss any urgent messages during my 24-hour "fast," that was largely a matter of chance.

As to whether this Internet fast was good for me, that's a tougher question to answer. On the one hand, I think my day without Internet was, on the whole, less stressful than a normal day with it. But the time I spent recovering from the "fast" was actually more stressful than usual, because I had to clear out a 24-hour backlog of messages. And I'll probably have to continue putting in extra hours over the course of the next week or so to make up for the day of work I missed.

I certainly wouldn't say that Internet fasting is something I'd want to incorporate into my life on a regular basis. But as something to do every year on Yom Kippur, it has its points. It certainly does make the day feel different from other days. It forces me to take my mind off my usual everyday concerns and focus on different things — maybe not spiritual things, exactly, but things I might never find the time for on a normal day. And at the same time, it makes me more appreciative of the many blessings of the Internet when I finally get to go back to it. (And unlike regular fasting, it doesn't make me feel too ill by the time I break my fast to be able to enjoy it.)

And if I want to feel more connected to my ancestors in the shtetl, well, after all, they lived without the Internet every day of their lives.