With Christmas usually comes presents – at least for those of us with enough discretionary income to buy and receive gifts. This is usually a joyous exchange. As I opened the presents given to me last week, I was happy to receive them but also realized that some of the gifts meant I no longer […]
Living Lightly
Susan Vogt on living more simply but abundantlyBrowsing Posts tagged Christmas
Christmas is almost upon us. Perhaps you will receive some new electronics (a phone, laptop, TV, game system, etc.) Yea! But leap ahead a week or so and this also brings up the question of what to do with your older, maybe broken or obsolete technology items. How do you recycle these responsibly? I did […]
Here we are in the middle of Advent (Nov. 28 – Dec. 24, 2021). I will repeat only once my tired rant about Christmas being Dec. 25 and Advent being the season of waiting and preparing, NOT celebrating and gift giving. Over the past decade I’ve written 20 posts related to how to manage this […]
Having just finished 4 blog posts on the limitations of recycling plastics plus one post reminding us to commit to reducing our possessions, Christmas 2020 arrived. It hasn’t been a pretty year with the pandemic, racial unrest, and polarizing political tensions. Yet, many of us at least have probably received some nice new Christmas presents. […]
Today I want to share excerpts from an article I just read on EarthBeat by Brenna Davis, Do you have too many spatulas, too? It raises so many of the questions I’ve been asking myself for 10 years I could have written it myself – but why spend my time when she says it so […]
The joy of Christmas is too often accompanied by over-consumption of presents and plastics. Neither is good for the soul. Over the years I’ve written a number of blogs on simplifying Christmas. Click here to review some of them. This year I offer you Joshua Becker’s list of How to Restore Gift Giving Sanity. BUT, […]
I’ve got a big plan for Lent this year which will come in a couple weeks so I’m just catching up on smaller things that came my way recently. Keep your eyes open for opportunities Some give aways come by chance. We hired someone to do some electrical work at our house and the worker […]
Before I reveal what “BVG” means, I’d like to share a letter to my grandchild. See if you can guess the BVG. Dear grandchild, Once upon a time, a long time ago, BVG, you may wonder what families did for fun. In my own family we played GAMES. Lots of them were board games. We […]
There are several layers to Recycling Christmas:I’ll start with the traditional religious and gift-giving concepts and the go on to those that fit the more classic ecology dimensions. 1.The SUPER-SPIRITUAL: This approach goes back to the basics and reminds us that Christmas is about the Christ coming into the world as a human being. It […]
HANGING ON: It was just one leaf – but it kept hanging on. That’s what I thought as I looked outside my bedroom window from Nov. 21 to Dec. 5. As I sat in my prayer space during those two weeks, I kept pondering the spunk of this lonely leaf (see the middle of our […]
I’ve been writing this blog since 2010 and over these 7 years have explored many angles of voluntary simplicity (material, emotional, spiritual, and technological). The question I keep coming back to is: How much is enough? – How much is too much? On the material level I realize that there is a point where more […]
Christmas has come and gone. That means that we have gratefully received some nice gifts – often clothes. This also means that a natural consequence is the timeliness of giving away older things that are no longer needed or wanted. This is not bad, but it’s also not sacrificial giving. As I looked over the […]
December 26 is celebrated as “Boxing Day” in some countries. The name comes from the tradition that on the day after Christmas well-to-do families would give a box of money or presents to their servants or customers. I remembered this as I was cleaning up after Christmas and was struck by the extraordinary number of cardboard […]
Traditionally the time leading up to Christmas is a time of shopping. It is also the time that my own nuclear family again faces the question of how we are going to celebrate the holidays and what will we do about gift giving. In the past we have ranged from buying a gift for everyone, […]
As we approach the season of Thanksgiving and Gift Giving, my mind turns to how to be generous. What is truly helpful vs. what just adds to another’s clutter, feeds an addiction, or stresses the environment. First, let me say that it is possible to overthink this generosity thing. At its core generosity is about […]
Like most families, we received some nice Christmas gifts. Two weeks later, I also received a call from the Lupus organization that picks up household items to sell. The proceeds go to the Lupus Foundation. I noticed some happy coincidences. Even though I didn’t make a conscious effort to have the gifts coming in equal my outgoing […]
Giving and receiving gifts is nice. It’s even joyful when you find the right gift for a person you love. Some people love the challenge of the hunt. I don’t. For me finding a suitable gift is often a burden, especially around Christmas time. Although I have a reputation for being frugal, it’s not just […]
Since we are about to start the Advent season (which means most of the USA has already begun decorating and buying for Christmas), I plead with you to wait. Wait because Advent is about waiting, in the dark, for a wonderful person to come, and it’s not Santa Claus. Wait because we serve too many […]
(Make sure you read my PS at the end.) It’s the Christmas shopping season. Today I went into a store. Maybe it’s been too long. I was astounded by the prices for stuff I considered junk – clothes that didn’t look flattering or stylish, toys that were mostly modeled after cartoon characters or required batteries […]
To buy or not to buy – That is the question. The word “black” can be a source of pride or despair. In the Great Depression it meant the economy was in crisis. For the day after Thanksgiving it has come to mean the beginning of the Christmas shopping season when retailers move from red […]
