Autumn is well upon us, and people who have been struggling to stay afloat in this lousy economy all year are now faced with the prospect of the coming holiday gifting season. Which can be daunting in the best of times, but can be positively depressing for those not used to not having cash or credit for the consumerist frenzy. This post is about helping to trim the gift list if you haven’t done so already, plus how and where to find gifts for loved ones that they may cherish forever, help maintain and spread the joy of the season, and not cost an arm or leg.

Previous Posts:
Christmas in a Depressed Economy
‘Tis the Season: Gift Ideas

1. Analyze your gift-giving habits, trim the tree.

In our free-wheeling consumerist culture the Christmas shopping season represents half or more of retailers’ annual intake and an average middle class family’s greatest expenditures on unnecessary items for the year. If your family is struggling, the credit cards with their usurious interest rates have already been cut into small pieces and thrown away, consumer loans have been paid down or frozen in place, and promises to self not to spend more than you’ve got have been made. Don’t change a thing just because the holidays are coming!

If you have a lot of friends and extended family for whom you’ve bought gifts in years past, networking with them early is a good idea. See if doing something other than gifting this year could be a thankful relief to them as well as you. Pot-luck holiday get-togethers are fun, and no one person has to provide all the food and drinks. “Re-Gifting” parties can be great fun too, where you give some trinket you got from someone else in the past (it’s been just taking up room in the closet or on the shelf ever since) to someone else. Chances are someone will remember who gave Fred that hideous tie he’s never worn and laughs will ensue. The holidays are for fun, so have some!

If you’ve got children, find out what they want most instead of just gathering their wish lists of every toy they’ve seen advertised on TV. For children old enough to know Santa isn’t Bill Gates, one big gift can be better than ten little ones. Items like bicycles, roller blades and other sports equipment can be purchased second hand and refurbished, maybe personalized with glitter paint and trim. Go for things they’ll really use and enjoy, stay away from basic junk.

2. Seek out mainstream and even obscure second hand, consignment and/or junk outlets in your area.

There’s nothing like serious holiday shopping among the hugely varied items at a resale outlet, where the perfect something for someone on your list could be found. Often area churches, animal rescue outfits and civic organizations host thrift shops. In many places there are great private resale shops that offer amazing items from art to furniture, crockery to costume jewelry. Don’t overlook those even if you also plan to shop at Goodwill or Salvation Army.

I’ve found beautiful handcrafted chess sets and boards, totally unique hand-whittled puzzle boxes, antique glassware and china, beautiful jewelry boxes, hand-crafted doll houses, etc. in some unlikely haunts. Sometimes something just needs cleanup and a couple of touches, sometimes you can put a lot of yourself into it with a new paint job or fixes, and again you can always personalize. Commercialized junk doesn’t tend to become someone’s most treasured keepsake. Remember it’s all about the thought and effort, not about the price tag.

3. Know your local resources.

If your area has a Freecycle club, think about joining. You can get rid of some of your closet-clutter and maybe get items for gifting. Great for baby furniture and accessories, bicycles and such, often tools, household items, yarns and needles, fabric and sewing machines, books, clothing, home repair and building supplies, etc. All free.

Keep up with your area’s want ads and garage/yard sales as well. Spending Saturdays thrifting and bargain-hunting can be both fun and rewarding as you add to your collection of things “perfect for…” whoever will most love that gift. Your time and effort adds to the value of any gift you give!

4. Think Creatively!

Many people don’t know that you can make a wonderfully colorful and snuggly warm blanket out of a stack of old sweaters. They make great stuffed animals too, if you’re handy with a sewing machine. Purses out of old jeans, sparkled up with some craft store jewels and studs are always welcome presents to the teen set. For younger girls a box full of sparkly costume jewelry is great, as is a laundry basket chock full of fancy dress-up items (including high heels and hats!). For already-creative young’uns, a bunch of items from which they can salvage feathers, beads, trims, etc. may be just the thing. Art supplies can often be found second hand in areas where artists are, I always buy up as much paint, brushes, pastels, pencils, charcoals, canvases, sketchbooks and whatever else as I possibly can.

5. Have Kitchen, Will Travel.

Consider pouring your heart into food for family and friends this year. Make batches of yummy fudge, lots of Christmas cookies, try your hand at hard candies, etc. Such things are always most welcome during the holidays even if they don’t tend to last long in a crowd! If you have to go to the company party and are expected to bring a gift, fudge always works even better than some cheap soap or cologne or tie, and you don’t have to worry about whether you’ve drawn a man or a woman’s name from the hat.

6. Gift of your time and talents.

Have a friend or relative working two part-time jobs, barely getting by and who could really use a night out? Know a caregiver who is stressed to the max? Stumped for something for the teenagers? You can make some beautiful cards (post on that upcoming) and include ‘tickets’ for babysitting, house or pet sitting, a home-cooked meal (at their convenience), even a movie night in your den using your big-screen TV and DVD player. To be redeemed later.

Whatever your talents are or time you can spare, it can be gifted. If you sew, you can gift that. If you cook, gift that. If you have a vehicle, you can gift chauffeur duty. If you paint or craft, you can gift those too. There’s no reason to spend money you don’t have on things to give away to others who may not need or appreciate them just because it’s the holiday season. If you plan wisely and aren’t shy of new adventures, this could turn out to be the most holiday fun you’ve had in years! Even better, once the real spirit of the season infects you, it’s hard to get rid of even when the economic situation isn’t so tough any more.

So start planning, see how much fun you can turn this into by involving your kids, your spouse, your friends!

The news these days is chock full of dramatized street theater as the “haves” fight about ridiculous things like super-bonuses for AIG grifters, amazing world-class ponzi money-laundering schemes, and how we on the low end of the totem pole get to pay through the nose (as usual) to bail these crooks out. At this point it’s not even a partisan fight, it’s just rich versus poor. As usual. We who have been actually harmed by these interminable games of economic Risk are just trying to survive with the basics – food, clothing and shelter.

While I hope that anyone who regularly reads this blog has already bought their seeds and planted their ‘taters, there are things we usually have to purchase – or trade for – because we don’t produce our own at home. Sure, it doesn’t take more than a quarter acre of yard to keep a fresh milk goat or half a dozen chickens who give us eggs for free, but often people will be unable to even do that much. Keeping that goat fresh requires breeding once a year, and then you’ve got to either deal with a smelly billy goat or transport to where the smelly billy goat is standing stud. And what about the kid? That’s something my family could never quite conscience (these youngsters, if not also female, are usually slaughtered for meat). And don’t let anybody fool you. Those chickens CAN fly (sorta). At least to get over the fence into your neighbor’s yard.

If you are lucky enough to still have a roof over your family’s heads, there are ways to save a great deal on foods you can’t produce in your garden but need to keep everyone healthy and satisfied. Nothing makes us feel wealthier than a truly fine and healthy diet. Plus, that alone can save us multi-thousands in chronic diseases we really don’t have to get in the first place. The first of these is to join a local CSA. With this membership, which is critical to purchase right now if you can, you get a portion of the crops and products of local farmers near your home. Even if you garden, this can help fill out the take so you’ve got more to work with. Buying local directly supports your local farmers, and helps them to purchase the seeds and equipment they need to keep on producing.

Even better, many CSAs also keep bees for honey, cows and/or goats for dairy, chickens for free range eggs plus poultry, and some even raise pigs and steers for later slaughter so you can purchase a “share” of those as well. When I was young – it was a large family – my mother always purchased a half a steer every year to freeze in the chest freezer, along with as many chickens as she could get locally. Not only are these animals raised humanely and fed on pasture and hay that they’re naturally designed to consume for maximum health, they were always locally slaughtered so that even the ground beef came from just those steers raised on that farm. Nowadays when ground meat from the supermarket may contain the remains of as many as 100 animals, some of whom were no doubt very sick when they went in, this is vastly preferable.

But what I want to talk about in this post is dairy. Not just milk, but also cheese, yogurt, butter, sour cream and other dairy products we use on an almost daily basis to add protein to our diets and keep the kids happy. The reason to avoid store-bought dairy is more than just the fact that big dairy farms often pollute their milk with genetically engineered hormones and such, it also avoids the mass mixing of milk from farms far and wide that must be mass-pasteurized and have much of its useful ingredients neutralized. So that you end up paying $4 or more for a pound of butter, $2 or more for a few ounces of yogurt or sour cream, etc. We can save a great deal of money – and learn a lot about how food works – if we do this sort of thing for ourselves.

If you’ve a CSA with a dairy division, or a local dairy farm, you can often purchase raw milk on the sly (the government is trying hard to close this loophole). This gives you the raw material to work with to produce your own high-protein and full-fat food ingredients. My family once had a friend up the road who got a fresh goat in payment of a debt, a guy who didn’t drink much milk. That goat gave 2 gallons a day, so I did the calligraphy for his craft catalog in exchange for a gallon a day of fresh goats milk. Which he delivered! Now, you need a mechanical separator to get cream out of naturally homogenized goat milk, and I didn’t have one, so we just drank it. Cow’s milk is much easier to work with…

Raw cow’s milk naturally separates just by being left to separate. Cream rises to the top, the regular milk settles below. You should always pasteurize what you have, meaning that before you drink or use it, go ahead and boil for 5 full minutes. This can destroy some of the natural caesins in the milk or cream, but is definitely worth it to avoid any sicknesses that might result from raw. Just separate the cream first, and what’s left after pasteurization makes fine butter, sour cream and rich cheese. If you’re working with goat’s milk and don’t have a separator, make the butter first since this will serve to separate. Just keep it refrigerated or frozen for longer term storage.

To make butter, just fill a sterilized quart jar half full of whole milk or cream and shake it. This will take some time, but is definitely worth it. The cream component will tend to coagulate and this is what you want. It also floats atop whole milk so is easily scooped out. Accumulate a pound or so of this thick butter, fold in a little salt, and it can be used immediately or frozen in wax and plastic for later. It won’t be yellow, but that’s just another coal-tar dye. Who needs it?

To make yogurt, a spoonful of ‘live’ yogurt is added to a jar of milk and well-shaken, allow it to set overnight (shaking occasionally). By morning it should be thick, stir again and refrigerate. Add sugar, honey, spices, flavorings, whatever, and spoon in liberally on your burritos or use it as dip for pita (which is also easy to make). Yogurt is a bit like sourdough, in that your refrigerated starter can last for years. A single purchase, you can turn it into whatever you like! It freezes fairly well, so you can make a lot when you get your local milk and it’ll last a long time.

Cheese is a bit more labor intensive, but worth it if your family gets most of its animal protein from milk products. There are both natural and genetically engineered rennets on the market, go for the natural if you can. These can also be salvaged from commercial, natural cheeses and added. Cream makes the best strong cheeses, but this takes some time. The internet has sources for the necessary ingredients, or perhaps your CSA can help you with that as well. Be choosy – local food is a growing movement as things in the dollar-based global economy fall apart, be on the forefront of making sure you can do as much for yourself as possible!

This sort of knowledge – how to grow, preserve, obtain and stretch food for your family – is not knowledge that ever really “goes out of style.” Who knows what will happen to those jet-setters and politicians who whine endlessly about pieces of paper or mere bits and bytes of information that grant their wealth – so much greater than We the People who are just trying to survive? Do we really care? If we can do for ourselves, they don’t seem so important anymore, and our personal worlds expand locally to include all the things we really need.

Perhaps in the end that would be the greatest lesson any of us could ever teach our children as well as our erstwhile ‘masters’. We’ll be okay, thanks. When you’re hungry, we’ll talk about it…

So get busy, folks! Find out where your CSAs are, start making some friends in the farming community, see if you can turn that shed into a goat barn, and figure out how many chickens you can host in your back yard without compromising the garden. We can live through this, maybe come out the other side more confident than ever that we’ll never be helpless again!

Links:

Local Harvest: CSA
Dairy CSA
Cook for Good: Yogurt
Homemade Cheese
Cheese Making & Supplies
What’s Cooking: Homemade Cheese

As we move into 2008’s extended holiday period, more than a few families are wondering if there will be a Christmas this year. Sure, some retailers are going all out to stay open long enough to see if anybody’s buying this year, but with consumer credit at a virtual standstill, international trade languishing on the docks and jobs being lost by the thousands every week, it’s a no-brainer that this Christmas isn’t going to be ‘the usual’ consumer spending orgy of Christmases past.

Presuming that your family still has a home, can heat it, and enough income to put food on the table, there are ways to have a festive, meaningful Christmas without going further into debt and without ending up with cheap Chinese junk that nobody really wants or needs.

The best thing you can do for your family is Make Your Own, and involve the kids! We save old Christmas cards in a box in the closet, pull them out around Thanksgiving and use them, plus various saved papers, made papers, trims, sequins, glitter, buttons, studs, etc. to make brand new Christmas cards for the people in our lives. Scissors and glue, a paper cutter, maybe some cutsey hole punches and lots of odds and ends, these cards inevitably get saved by every Mom, Grandma or other friend/relative who gets them! And kids are especially creative in this area. Sure you’ll have to clean up the mess, but a great time was had by all.

There are schedulers, list-keepers, budding writers and artists in just about every family. So another great gift are notebooks, journals, sketchbooks and schedulers you can make or buy. My friends over at Casual Keystrokes have compiled a worthy list of the best of the best journals, notebooks, sketchbooks and schedulers available online, some of them offer great deals and discounts.

If you really want to put some ’self’ into it, the ideas and designs of some of those items Keystrokes suggests can be used as models for do it yourself gift projects. My grandson learned how to make leather bound notebooks in school, has really turned it into an art form. He collects old used leather jackets from Goodwill and other thrift shops, and recycles that leather for bindings. The neatest looking ones are patchwork of different kinds of leather, bound together with leather glue (can be purchased at a craft supply store).

Paper can be bought or made, but making can be fun. Did you know that you can make fine paper from collected dryer lint? Frugal Living offers the recipe and details on how to do this. Fine handmade paper bound in a fine handmade leather bound book can be the most delightful gift under the tree for anyone who loves to write, doodle, or keep meticulous notes.

You might be surprised at how useful that dryer lint can be to the dedicated crafter. PlanetPal offers recipes and instructions for how to make lint paper mache and lint clay as well as lint paper. And if there are very young ones on your Christmas list, there are some great patterns and instructions for how to make stuffed animals and dolls, and that dryer lint makes great stuffing too!

There is also the tradition of “Hobbit Presents” that some families find so fun. This is the practice of re-giving a previous year’s gift to someone else. When it’s unwrapped, the family can remember where it came from, who has enjoyed it, and who gave it to whom. These sort of gifts need to be more substantial than cheap plastic stuff from China, but quality items handmade with skill and care make great Hobbit Presents. Pride in craftsmanship is something children miss out on too much these days. Teaching them, encouraging them and helping them learn to value such things from themselves and others won’t hurt them a bit.

So it’s November. Get busy!!!

Links:

‘Tis the Season: Gift Ideas
Casual Keystrokes
Making Paper from Dryer Lint
Lint Craft Recipes
Stuffed Toy Patterns

World markets continue to take dramatic hits and the Dow has fallen below 10,000 for the first time in four years. Seems a lot of banks and other players are unhappy with the trillion dollar bailout package passed last Friday because it limits their personal golden parachutes and stock option scams. Awwww. Should we call the waaaaambulance for these whiners? Nope. If they didn’t need our money they shouldn’t have begged for a handout in the first place. In the meantime, regular people are having a much harder time putting food on the table as prices rise dramatically and more and more find themselves out of work. This post is a beginner’s primer on how to get food if you can’t afford it.

Before I get to the list of good links readers may find helpful depending on their particular situations, readers should know that many states, such as the one where I live (NC) have budgetary caps on how much relief in the form of food stamps they are able to provide. This can mean that even as increasing numbers of people find themselves going hungry, fewer people will have access to the standard governmental relief. Thus more people must turn to other providers. A good overview of those providers supported by the USDA commodity program is provided at Amber Waves. If your family is in danger of ‘food insecurity’ be sure to familiarize yourself with emergency providers in your area. Cities generally have soup kitchens, places where you can go for a hot meal. Most smaller cities and many towns or counties also have food banks, check into what you will need to provide to qualify.

For those with few to no reasonable alternatives, or who may find themselves in a chronic situation (or are just stubbornly self-sufficient), here are some fine hints about foraging. Foraging the nearly lost art of getting your food from places other than the neighborhood supermarket or soup kitchen. Food prices are projected to continue rising and stay high for at least the next three years. Part of this is our newfound dependence on imported foods with huge ‘carbon footprints’ due to transportation and energy-intensive mechanistic agriculture. If you’re trying to keep your family alive and healthy, you honestly don’t need mangos in January or expensive processed foodstuffs at any time.

Of course, as with all matters of saving real money on food, you’ll have to learn (or remember) how to cook for yourself. Eating out and buying pre-prepared meals is the most expensive way to eat, not to mention the most unhealthy. Since health care is a growing desperate concern for everyone, staying healthy should be paramount in all our planning.

From the great DailyKos “Frugal Fridays” series, Foraging: Living Off the Fat of the Land we get several good ideas. Of course living close to water allows foragers with a little skill the luxury of catching crabs, crayfish, regular fish, baby clams, etc., and seaweed can be a fine addition to the pot to lend nutrients and salt (plus ample amounts of iodine). Living inland can offer lots of fine opportunities to forage for edible fungi, berries, tubers and pot herbs as well. it’s puff ball season in my neck of the woods, which are spendid stuffed with chopped acorns, cabbage, herbs and onions, baked in clarified butter in a covered dish. Hickory nuts are falling, and the wild sunflowers are blazing – these are otherwise known as Jerusalem artichokes, and eat like small potatoes.

Of course there’s Cossack Asparagus in marshlands almost everywhere. These are your basic cattails, and all parts of the plants are edible all times of year. The new green shoots are better than bamboo shoots (which also may be found here and there), but I best like the set-cob’s fuzz which can be ground into a very light, fine flour for baking and thickening broths. As things nutritional become rarer, families will likely have to learn how to like basic stew meals that can be made in large pots and eaten over a period of two or three days (refrigerated in between, of course).

If you don’t mind killing and cleaning, there’s a reason they call possom the “other other white meat.” People have traditionally made fine meals of squirrel, turkey, various ground birds, snakes and the standard larger game. Just be sure you’ve got whatever permit is required, both for hunting and fishing, in your area for the game you’re seeking. I’ve known families who could eat meat twice a week (all anybody needs) for an entire winter from a single deer. Best advice is to stay away from carnivores and scavengers (like ravens and buzzards, bears and racoons).

People in the country or with ample back yards could consider a fresh goat for milk and some few chickens (easily kept but noisy if you’ve a rooster) for eggs and occasional Sunday dinner. Check your local paper’s “livestock” want ads, chickens are very cheap and goats aren’t anywhere near as expensive to buy or feed as a cow. Or make friends with a farmer who has livestock. Around here I can get cheap (or for straight barter) milk, honey, free range eggs, grass-fed meat if I ate it, and all the composted fertilizer my garden can handle.

Of course learning how to garden will help a lot. Tomatoes and peppers and salad stuff can easily be grown in pots and flats on the patio or deck, herbs in the kitchen window, and many other things if you’ve the room, a shovel to turn ground and a metal rake to break it up. Know what grows in what seasons in your area – some crops like cabbage, collards, kale, lettuce, spinach, radishes, broccoli, brussles sprouts and cauliflower need cold weather to develop. Kale will keep on growing right through the snow! Others need lots of heat and sun. If you plant extras you can preserve for the future, or barter for trades with those who have foods you didn’t grow. Specializing can be better than trying to grow it all. Barter will become increasingly important as the food shortages and high prices continue.

Many wild flowers and weeds are edible, and some of those are more nutritious than anything you can buy in the store. Violets, dandelions (greens and flowers), day lilies, wood sorrel, purslane, etc. Don’t forget kudzu – its greens are very high in protein and its flowers make lovely jelly or colorful additions to salads.

Out in the woods there are acorns, elderberries, fox grapes, sloe plums, wild cherries, blueberries, hickory nuts, walnuts, ground nuts and other goodies in addition to the edible ferns and fungi. Be sure you know what you’re doing with those fungi – many local extension agencies offer print material and courses to let you know what’s edible and what’s not.

And don’t be shy – if you live in a farming/gardening region, keep track of who’s been harvesting, go ahead and ask permission to glean from those fields. Modern mechanical machinery leaves quite a lot of edible food behind, and farmers usually just plow it under. Many or most farmers in your area may be entirely willing to have you gather what you can of their already harvested crops.

Foraging is a lot like work, but more fun. Since millions will be out of work (and many of those one out of a two-income household), there should be time if you’ve got the energy and desire. Do check out some of the links in this article and below, get yourself psyched about the possibilities right now. In really hard times all we really have to do is survive, and learning to do for ourselves instead of waiting for a handout that may never come is very empowering. Kids love this stuff, so be sure to include them on your weekend foraging trips!

Links:

Emergency Providers Help Put Food On the Table
Foraging: Living Off the Fat of the Land
BHM: You can become a hardcore forager
Wild Food Foragers of America
Edible Wild Things: “Cossack Asparagus”
Wild Herbs/Foods Archive
Staples Archive
Harvesting Wild: The Mast Crop
Modern Forager

Posts to This Series:

Part 1: Roadblocks and Interference
Part 2: Food: Eating What You Can Get

People who are living frugally don’t have to stop having fun and don’t have to stay home all the time. They just have to weigh their choices more carefully than people who have a lot of money to spend and don’t mind spending it. While it’s true that many of us consider a trip to visit family members in another state to be an actual vacation, but not necessarily because the people we’re visiting are all that fun and interesting. Usually it’s because the cost of gasoline, necessary vehicle upkeep, motels along the way and restaurant meals for the whole family for days or weeks at a time can easily eat up every cent of your vacation savings or tax refund, leaving zip for trips to Six Flags or ski resorts or Disney World – places our kids think of as actual vacations.

There’s a new partnership movement afoot in my state that takes great advantage of the many scenic, historic and educational wonders that make this state a tourist destination for millions of people every year. I strongly suspect there are many other states doing much the same thing, and the information’s not that hard to find. It’s called “Agritourism,” and it’s offering benefits to farmers, rural communities and artists of all varieties via partnerships with arts councils, agricultural extension services, state and federal parks services and small tourism operations in established tourist regions.

There is one such partnership in my already tourist-soaked state (North Carolina), where family farmers have lost their traditional cash crop (tobacco) and farm communities are struggling hard to stay afloat even while the ski resorts, mountain lodges and coastal attractions are doing pretty well. It’s called HomegrownHandmade, a partnership between the NC Agritourism Board, the NC Extension Service and the NC Arts Council. There are also some private and public grant agencies involved on the provider end, which allows the artists and farmers to get things going.

What they’re offering are “Art Roads and Farm Trails,” usually encompassing attractions and activities in 4-5 contiguous counties at a time that, judging from the descriptions, could easily keep a family busy and well-entertained for at least a week. Accommodations can be expensive over that length of time, but there are usually homey B&Bs listed in the towns along the way, and state parks along the routes as well where families can put their camping and nature skills to good use for not very much money. Tours at the offerings can cost between $5 and $10 per person (young children usually free), but that’s not so big an expenditure for a day’s worth of fun – and at the farms and wineries, that can include food and drink.

So far HomegrownHomemade has 16 Trails set up, information available on their website along with links to the listed attractions so you can easily plan ahead, while maintaining enough flexibility to really enjoy the time with your family and just kick back here and there.

With Trail names like “Pictures from the Piedmont,” “Scenes of the Sandhills,” “Crossroads, PatriArts and Native Ways,” and “Lights… Waves… Action!” (among others), you can pick and choose a Trail that appeals most to your family. But that’s just my state. I’m betting that there are similar partnerships in your state that would keep you closer to home, or in neighboring states.

Tennessee has some truly spectacular state parks that are often well-kept secrets to your average tourist, and like Kentucky, almost all the state parks boast fine and well-maintained golf courses. Rock climbing, rafting, canoeing, tubing, fishing, camping, hiking… people these days sometimes forget how much fun there is to be had just spending real quality time with those you love most, somewhere where the air is fresh, the water is cold, and the food always tastes great because it’s cooked over a fire.

Instead of sending the kids away to summer camp, why not send the whole family – including yourself? Go ahead and break out those old Boy Scout manuals and field guides, maybe pack a beloved book that’s not too long and which your children may not have read or heard. My grandchildren remember vividly a camping trip we went on over the Memorial Day weekend one year, where we adults took turns reading a few chapters by flashlight every night as they were settling into their sleeping bags. Everyone’s got a favorite. Could be Nancy Drew or a Hardy Boys mystery, good ol’ Huck and Tom stories, whatever. Wherever you are, there’s usually at least one book of stories about the region and/or its history, which you can pick up new or used. Get your fishing licenses and show the kids what it’s like to rustle up their own grub, maybe teach them how to bake cornbread in a covered cast iron pot buried in the campfire’s ashes.

Most state park campgrounds have camp stores open during the day, hot showers and well-lighted bathrooms as well as sites with electrical outlets even if you’re in a tent. If you make reservations ahead of time, you can ensure you’ve got the most convenient site and it won’t cost you extra. Camping equipment can be had for free or practically nothing through the Freecycle Network or Craigslist, or even your town’s SuperShopper-style classified weekly. Or borrow some! Three-room tents with screen porches, fine folding sling chairs, all the utensils you’ll need, sleeping bags and air mattresses, folding tables, even those big waterproof Tupperware storage tubs to pack things in. Don’t forget to pack playing cards and chips (the kids really do want to learn how to play poker, you know), dice, a board game or two that your family enjoys. And if you really want to splurge, see what the barter exchange rate is in your neighborhood for a nice pop-up camper trailer or motor home.

With a bit of foresight, some clever web-surfing and not that much money your family can enjoy a week or two of fine vacation time this year and not feel the least bit underprivileged about it! If readers have any good ideas of their own along this vein, do post them for us. Happy Trails!

Link:

HomegrownHandmade

My last post offered some Tips for Avoiding Pressure to Shop, mostly in the context of getting out of the usual “girls’ day out” type of expensive, mall-hopping, credit card fueled frenzy that way too many people in the modern world view as entertainment. At least, until the bills come due. Sad statistics demonstrate that if medical costs from an accident or illness in the family don’t lead to bankruptcy, credit card debt will. These are the two biggest contributors to middle class bankruptcies in the U.S. at this time, and as the mortgage crisis becomes ever worse, it’s not going to get any better.

In this post I’m going to offer some ways of thinking that can become habitual without too much trouble, that will help keep you out of debt by not going into debt in the first place. Not everyone can put these to good use, but those who can will find that their shoestring budgets go a lot farther in covering necessities.

• First and foremost, get rid of the credit cards. Even if you just pay the minimum every month, all that covers is interest and fees. Nothing you bought with the cards gets paid for, and your debt never goes down. I know this can be difficult when you receive a dozen “Great Credit Card Offers!” every week in the mail, but you can ignore them if you try. There are no “great credit card offers,” there are just financiers trying to profit from your spending habits. If you can start thinking of them in those terms it’s a lot easier to resist.

And don’t be fooled into believing you HAVE to have a credit card in order to purchase anything on-line. Your debit card from the bank usually comes with a particular card option stamped somewhere that allows you to indicate what kind of card you’re using, even though the transaction works just like regular bank account debit. If you don’t have enough money in your account to buy that nice watch you saw advertised on the Shopping Channel, you shouldn’t be buying it. It’s not that hard to find out what time it is, and most grocery stores sell $5 watches right there in the checkout line anyway. They work fine.

• Another way to save money – while at the same time doing wonders for your family’s nutritional health – is to learn how to cook from scratch. I have a sister who hasn’t had a working stove/oven for the last 15 years, and never bothered to get one because she doesn’t cook and neither does her husband. The family, which includes three children, lives on fast food. Wendy’s gristleburgers, MacDonald’s big macs and Happy Meals, most any highly fattening, nutritionally deficient fast food or processed junk they can buy. Not only is this outrageously expensive, it leads directly to health problems, obesity and chronic depression. For which my sister takes drugs she doesn’t really need. My best advice on this is to sit down and watch – really watch, paying attention – the movie “Supersize Me.” It’ll scare the heck out of you, and maybe scare the junk food out of you too!

It’s just not that hard to heat up some frozen vegetables or open a can of beans, cook up a roast or even try your hand at some cool vegetarian alternatives. Get a few cookbooks at a used book store, read through them, see if there aren’t some recipes that make your mouth water. I’m betting there are, and your family will thank you for it.

• You can also purchase food and home products like toilet paper, toothpaste, etc. in bulk when on sale. Prices are not coming down at the grocery and drug stores any time in the future, as increasing energy costs translate directly into higher prices for everything. If your local store is having a week-long 2-for-1 sale on canned and boxed goods and TP, paper towels, garbage bags, etc., take advantage of it! You’re going to use these items in the course of your daily life regardless. Might as well double up at half the price.

• Another idea if you’ve got the time and energy is to make your own household products and beauty items. These projects can be great fun for families to work on together during at-home weekends, and many who do this find that their products earn serious fans among the extended family visitors and friends who end up using them at your house. Or get them as gifts, since they make such good gifts. There’s some good information and recipes out there, such as Making Your Own Natural Designer Soaps. The web is a very useful tool, with sites devoted exclusively to recipes, projects, crafts and basics that you can make at home for not much money. Do some surfing!

• If you have school age children, get them a nice lunchbox and make their lunches. Not only will their lunch be more nutritious and useful than the junk that passes for food at most school cafeterias, you’ll save a significant amount of money. Buy dried fruit (roll-ups, raisins, mixed fruits, etc.) in bulk, have single-serving zip-locks handy to divvy it up into a week’s worth of lunch. If you make your own real good bread (with a machine or the old fashioned way), it can give peanut butter and jelly a whole new meaning!

I make sourdough bread, which my family thinks is the best bread anywhere. It’s quick because sourdough doesn’t have to be kneaded to death and doesn’t require hours’ worth of rising time. I usually use half unbleached all-purpose and half whole wheat, sometimes adding rye, barley or soy flour plus sunflower seeds, flax seeds, even chopped walnuts to make a slice a meal. A chunk of good cheese and a thermos (or purchase a carton) of milk and a baggie full of celery and carrot sticks makes a highly nutritious lunch that will stick with your child through the rest of the day and maybe even help them do better in school because they’re not falling asleep from sugar-crash during their afternoon classes.

• Home gardening saves a lot on truck vegetables now getting so expensive at the store than many can’t afford them at all any more. Things like bell peppers and tomatoes can be easily grown in containers on a sunny porch. Use a lot of compost in the soil mix (these are heavy feeders) and water them with compost tea regularly. My grandchildren eat raw peppers and tomatoes just like apples, and can never seem to get enough. I do sometimes include apples in their lunches, but if there’s a home grown, super-sweet handful of cherry tomatoes or a fist-sized home grown purple bell pepper they’re thrilled – and the envy of all their friends at school!

There will be more money-saving ideas forthcoming in future posts, and if any of my readers have good ideas please send ‘em in! Putting our heads together can help all of us better weather the coming recession, maybe even help us learn to live on less while enjoying our lives much more. Happy thrifting!

During this 2007 holiday season, it seems the children are all nestled asleep in their beds, with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads… oh, wait. You say the “children” are all teenagers now, terminally bored with Christmas and expecting a 10-gig iPod loaded with every album too objectionable to be played in public, plus keys to your a car and $400 worth of “Prison Chic” pants that hang somewhere around the thighs and show off their underwear?

Did the fudge never set, so you had to run to the store to buy enough ice cream to disguise the un-set fudge as super chocolate syrup? Were those tollhouse cookies hard as a rock, breaking grandpa’s dentures with the first bite? Did cousin Jim finish off the entire bottle of rum you’d brought for eggnog before passing out under the tree? Did the dog eat that perfect glazed ham before you could get it into the oven to heat? Did it snow during the night and hide all the firewood you’d stacked somewhere in the yard for the Christmas Eve fire? Are the in-laws insisting on watching Enemy of the State as a “Christmas Movie” instead of It’s a Wonderful Life for the 16th time?

Be of good cheer, enjoy yourself anyway, and…

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

In the 21st century almost all of us are acutely aware of the challenges of global warming, unsustainable consumption habits, the real human costs of petroleum dependency and the ever-rising cost of all forms of energy. When it’s difficult for regular middle class city and suburban dwellers to maintain their few hours of home down-time due to rising costs, the burden on rural dwellers can easily be impossible to bear.

Anyone committed to sustainable and self-sufficient living should have already begun planning their energy strategies. There are many things to consider before investing in energy sources. One of the first things a homeowner needs to become aware of are the various federal and state incentive programs available to them if they choose to meet some or all of their own energy needs with ‘green’ sources. These incentives have been fluctuating at the same time the per-watt price of the technology has been steadily falling. In some places the cost trade-off – where the cost to install is paid for by the incentives and further energy is basically free-for-upkeep – is down to 3-5 years. Which is a point when someone planning to live the whole rest of their lives on their homestead has no really good excuse not to invest! The Database of State Incentives offers a clickable map with details for all 50 states and is updated as incentives are tweaked or changed.

Once you have a good idea of how much you can offset your costs with incentives and tax rebates, you’ll need to have a good idea of exactly how much electricity you use. Gather at least 6 months’ worth of electric bills – including the hottest and coldest months – and write down your actual kilowatt usage. If your bill includes a breakdown of peak usage include that in another column. Some utility companies don’t include that information on monthly bills, but will supply it if you ask them nicely. It is important for you to know your peak usage so you will be able to supply enough energy to cover that.

If your overall kilowatt usage over the months falls within a fairly small range of variation but your peak usage looks really high, you’ll need to figure out what is using the most energy of all your activities and appliances. There are significant ways to lower a homestead’s energy demands, both overall and peak, but that requires knowing what you use and a willingness to pare your usage wherever you can.

Decisions about heating system and appliances you’ll need to replace in order to consume less electricity will also have to consider whether your future plans include energy on-site in banks of batteries, or whether you’d choose to use the commercial grid to its own advantage as a supplier. Battery technology is getting better all the time, but no cheaper.

My plan is is to use the grid, as our electric company is required by regulatory law to provide us with a “backwards meter” if we ever install our own electrical generating capacity. The deal is that we purchase our energy from the utility the same way we always have for running our appliances, power tools, lights and such. At the same time, the electric company must purchase all the energy our system produces. If we’re producing more than we’re using, it goes back out on the grid for other people to use. That pays down the difference, and conceivably could bring our monthly bill down to less than $50, or have the power company paying us!

We have been slowly but surely replacing appliances over the years with more energy efficient models, and are keeping ultra low-use and pedal powered models in mind as they develop for our next computers, radio/stereo, TV/video replacements. And of course we’re buying nothing but low-watt flourescent bulbs for lighting, even while keeping a stash of mantle-type oil lamps on hand.

So start your homework by organizing your needs and understanding your usage, check out some of the links below to help. Stay tuned for the next installment!

Links:

The Economics of Going Off-Grid

Grid-Connected Solar or Wind Systems

Solar Power at Half the Cost

MSNBC: ‘off-grid’ community

Wholesale Solar

Yes, the holiday season is upon us again, just when we are trying to adjust what the government does to our internal clocks twice a year (just to mess with our heads, I am convinced). It’s a time of get-togethers and feasts with family and friends, and the sometimes scary specter of gift-giving that puts such a huge dent in people’s tight budgets these days.

So I thought this is probably a good time to talk about gifts that cost little to nothing, but are always gladly received and mean more than just some trinket you could buy at the store.

Does that sound kind of strange in this era of conspicuous consumerism, where even 5-year olds brag to each other about how much their gifts cost (and how that means Santa must love them more?). Probably not to those of us who have given up conspicuous consumerism and found that we like it. Yet I am talking about gifts that hold enough thought and effort on your part to impress even the richest, most disdainful member of your family, who has always considered you a true failure of Capitalism for your choices in life. In my case that would be Aunt Edna and Uncle Francis.

Strangely enough, both Edna and Francis have come to look so forward to whatever I’ll come up with this year that they don’t even tut-tut my homemade Christmas stockings, kudzu-vine wreath or duct-taped tree anymore. We usually cut 2 or 3 scraggly scotch pines from the property, duct tape them together, then trim them to tie up against the wall in the corner from floor to 15′ ceiling. Even tape filler branches where necessary, then decorate. Doesn’t last but about 3 weeks, but it burns big and bright on New Year’s Eve in the back yard fire pit. Works for us!

If you’ve got a few seasons in on the homestead garden and are getting pretty good at putting up foodstuff, gifts of your homemade jellies, jams, fruit compotes and butters are always welcome. I make a brandied blackberry concoction my sophisticated older sister thinks is the most gourmet thing ever – she saves it for ‘important’ occasions and spoons it onto French vanilla ice cream, and has told me at least three ambassadors have begged for some to take home! You can dress up the jars with fabric circles under the rings and ribbon around the neck. Holiday hostesses like this sometimes better than wine! Of course if you make wine – or wine vinegars and herbed vinegars – these are also most welcome hostess gifts.

Gifts fresh from the kitchen are also popular. I bake huge batches of Christmas cookies and brownies in wide variety to send out to distant family and dear friends, including the younger set serving in the military. I also cook up nut brittles (including hickory nut brittle – you can’t believe how good it is!) and fudge. Chocolate fudge, cherry vanilla fudge, pumpkin fudge, peanut butter fudge, chocolate mint fudge, maple sugar fudge. This is also individually wrapped. I collect holiday tins which are great for the cookies and candy you’ll be keeping at your house for guests, or to go ahead and send to loved ones. You can pick up these tins in all sizes for pittance at garage sales, neighborhood yard sales and second-hand stores.

If you like to sew, making quilts and comforters can go quickly if you use the machine for most of it, and these can be baby or lap size to king size depending on what old clothes, blankets, sheets and such that you have on hand to recycle into it. If you knit or crochet, hats, scarves and mittens are nice to get.

You can even get the kids in on the act and let them help you make homemade Christmas cards with scrapbooking goodies – very fun – as well as gifts for their own friends, family and teachers. Sand candles are always fun to make, sachets, artwork and picture frames, sock dolls, painted flowerpots, cute cell phone covers… the list is endless.

Check the ideas in some of the links below, see what you’ve got to work with or can get easily, and start setting aside days on the weekends for family gift-making projects. There are dozens of great ideas there, with links to full instructions for each of them. The kids will get into the spirit in no time, and the holiday season will seem less like a consumerist nightmare while becoming a time of heartfelt giving. It’ll be fun again!

Links:

Not Made Of Money: 50 Homemade Gift Ideas

Pioneer Thinking: Gift Ideas

Easy Homemade Gifts

Amazing Moms: Christmas Gifts Kids Can Make