Day 228 of our Green Year: Giving Green Gifts

A few days ago, we mentioned we would be buying only only a few gifts this Christmas season. Well, in accordance with Our Green Year, we are choosing only to buy gifts that are green. This means if we buy clothes, it is fair-trade and organic cotton or hemp.
On top of that, whatever gifts we buy will have to be in very little packaging, hopefully made from recycled materials and made in such a way that they are not a detriment to the environment.

In short, we are getting eco-friendly gifts. We want to do this because we want to make sure the people we buy gifts for are getting something that comes with a clear mind.

There are plenty of options available for green gifts, and we hope that the people we buy them for appreciate that their gift did not take much from the world. Some of these items will cost more, but such is the case when you are going green. As Layla and I have found out, organic items and green items will often cost much more than the alternatives.

We have already figured out what we are getting our family, and all the items are green. Christmas is the time of giving, but it is also the time of being green, as we will show in the coming days.

Got any green gift suggestions? Let us know!

Day 226 of our Green Year: Purchasing Less

With Christmas only 21 days away, the desire to buy a bunch of Christmas presents for family is ever present. We want to show them that we care about them by buying them tonnes of presents. For Layla and myself, most of the joy of Christmas gifts comes in the form of watching our loved ones open up the presents we buy them.

However, months ago in Our Green Year, we chose to consume less through asking purchase questions and Christmas is no different. So, we will be buying much less in terms of presents. Instead of going for quantity (five gifts or more), we are going for quality (one great gift). We want to buy less because then we will consume less.

Christmas is the perfect time to start playing around with buying less things and only buying things someone actually needs. Don't go out and buy some singing bass fish, go out and buy your loved one something they will use over and over again. That is a great way to be green this Christmas.
Of course, there are other green ways to do your gift giving this year and we will be covering a few of them on Day 228, Day 232 and Day 237.

For this Christmas at the Baird ranch, it is about quality over quantity and one gift for each person.

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Last week, Layla and I were watching W-Five where they did a story on a practice in Canada that allows prospectors to come on your property and lay a claim for the mineral rights of your property. This allows them to drill on it, and even set up mines on it to get ore, uranium, coal or anything else that may be underneath. This is a completely legal thing to do and the show detailed the plight of several people in Ontario who have claims on their property that they can do little about.
Many people think that they own the property and therefore own the mineral rights, but this is not always true. If you have a slice of heaven in rural Canada, make sure you have the mineral rights to it so you don't one day wake up to a uranium mine in your front yard.