Not-So-Green Christmas

The environmentalist in me dreams of defying the Christmas monster, but for the second consecutive year I have caved and fed the beast. I want Christmas to be about family togetherness, not gift exchanges, but I can’t quite bring myself to risk being considered the Grinch.

Last year, when my siblings’ families and I gathered for a family Christmas at my parents’ place, I vowed to buy one gift apiece for my 1- and 2- year old nieces. But after seeing the piles of presents for the little ones under my parents’ Christmas tree, I feared being seen as the disinterested aunt. I rushed out to the mall for gifts to add to the piles.

Claire and Annika were too little to understand the concept of Christmas. The gift opening went on for hours; the girls became bored and stopped wanting to open presents. The toddlers had no clue about who had given what gift to them, and most of the presents were glanced at once, then thrown aside in the rush to open more.

So what were we adults competing for? To be seen as the most generous to the little girls? Instead of basking in reflected joy from the toddlers, as I had hoped, I felt dispirited with the pointless waste.

This year I vowed not to get caught up in Christmas consumerism. Then my husband booked a trip to Barbados as a way to spend time with his adult children. His daughter, 23, was thrilled at the gift of plane tickets to a tropical island. I hoped that being together for Christmas in an exotic location would be enough. But then I heard she was buying gifts for a gift exchange. Now the pressure was on again.

I considered a Heifer International donation for my stepson and his wife. As I perused the website, mulling buying a cow or a flock of chicks for a family in Africa, all I could think was Grinch, Grinch, Grinch. A recent New York Times article on green givers kept returning to mind.

The holidays have always been an emotionally combustible time for families, bringing together a sometimes volatile mix of siblings, crotchety grandparents and ill-behaved children. But in recent years, a new figure has joined the celebration, to complicate the proceedings even further: the green evangelist of the family — the impassioned activist bent on eradicating the wasteful materialism of the holidays.

Otherwise known, at least to skeptical traditionalists, as the new Grinch.

How dare I impose my values on others at Christmas? Wouldn’t these gifts to Heifer really be for me, an assuaging of my guilt for living in a materialist culture? So, instead of making a statement about my values, I gave in again to what I imagined were other's values. Everyone’s getting a gift, and some are expensive and trendy.

Apparently I want to be liked more than I want to avoid pointless buying. It’s in moments like this that I long to feel a part of a environmental movement.

It’s not enough to read on the Internet about others who say they are making sacrifices to live less materialistic lives. I long for the support of others in my community who also are trying to make the difficult decisions to avoid materialism. I dream of the day in which the standard post-Christmas question will be, “What did you do for Christmas?,” not “What did you get for Christmas?”

Brown Place

Ten days ago, I returned from vacation on a Maine island favored by cool sea breezes to a landscape blasted by heat. When I left, my woodland garden was green and thriving. Now many of the plants are browning and crispy. This shouldn’t be too surprising, given an August of both record heat and drought in North Carolina. Being outside in the 100-degree heat feels like standing too close to a fire you can’t get away from, and the plants, unlike us, can’t move indoors to air conditioning. Still, the rapidity of my plants’ decline is a bit of a shock.

In our Maine cottage, some of the evenings were cold enough that we built fires and wore sweatshirts. In Chapel Hill these days, anything I step outside in becomes a sweatshirt.

The garden looks so pathetic I can barely muster the initiative to keep watering the plants in my high priority zone. This zone consists of the plants in garden beds, mainly close to the house, that I have put a lot of effort into designing. I have adopted a tough love approach toward the rest of the landscape. Whatever survives is a winner, and whatever dies doesn’t deserve to be there. Rationalization is a wonderful ability.



I am proving once again that I am a fair weather gardener. Each year I begin to get enthusiastic about gardening in early February, become discouraged by August as it becomes clear the garden has passed its peak, and am tired by November of the physical labor involved in the fall spurt of planting trees and shrubs and raking leaves. At the moment I am wondering what it is about gardening that I was so enamored with just a few weeks ago. Growing vegetables has a clear benefit, but growing perennials and woodland plants has no utility. And when those plants die, failing to conform to my plans for beauty, I am confronted once again with the harshness of nature and its disinterest in my projects.

Last week the yellowed leaves of tulip poplars were falling so rapidly that it seemed like autumn when I glanced out the window. Nearly all of the Christmas ferns I “rescued” in early July appear to have bitten the dust, except for a few in deeper shade that received water from a soaker hose on a timer. The fothergilla shrubs that had been thriving in dry part-shade are half browned. The year-old serviceberry has dieback on two of its six branches.



The only bright spot, literally, is the bed of drought-tolerant sun perennials that I planted three years ago. Purple coneflowers are still blooming, Joe Pye weed and summer phlox add pink and white accents to the back of the border, and Heliopsis helianthoides has dozens of small yellow blooms. Salvia ‘May Night,’ Coreopsis ‘Moonbeam,’ and catmint are no longer flowering, but they are alive. Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ is about to flower, and verbena, with its magenta flowers, is spilling over the edges of the bed.

Each year that I garden, my admiration for farmers grows. I have not lost much to the drought—just a few plants that I can replace if I choose to do so. I don’t know how farmers can stand to see the crops that they work so hard to plant and tend wither and die, knowing that thousands of hoped-for dollars are disappearing. Farming seems like such a gamble, such an act of faith.

As I sit at my laptop at Caffe Driade searching for a suitable ending for this rather depressing post, a beer bottle on display suddenly explodes, splattering beer all over the room. We live in strange and uncertain times. How do we tell if record August heat and dryness is part of natural variability in our weather, or a shattering of our previous assumptions about North Carolina climate? As a fan of native plants, I hesitate to mention that my tropical plants are the ones that are thriving: banana plant, elephant ears, canna lilies, ficus.

Bottling Summer

I had a new experience this weekend, one that until recently I never would have imagined myself doing, much less enjoying. My husband and I converted 20 pounds of fresh tomatoes into tomato sauce and then bottled the sauce. We are as proud as little children who have learned a new trick. The eight pints of tomato sauce still sit in two neat rows on the kitchen counter where we can admire them.

The seed of an idea for this project came when I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a few weeks ago. She makes living off the harvest of her garden for a year seem almost fun. The book includes a recipe for homemade tomato sauce, homey descriptions of August afternoons spent socializing with friends while putting up tomatoes, and even reflections by her daughter on how processing tomatoes results in a kind of mindfulness, where nothing else exists except for attending to stirring the sauce.

The opportunity came when I saw 20-pound boxes of ripe tomatoes for sale for $20 at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market. My husband bought a 3-gallon pot and glass Ball jars and we were ready to go. I will admit I was a little apprehensive about the work involved in bottling. I come from a line of women who viewed working in the kitchen as drudgery and had limited imaginations when it came to food. The comment about cooking I remember most often hearing from my mother was “slaving in the kitchen.”

But playing with the tomatoes was fun from beginning to end. They were beautiful to look at, red and firm, about the size of baseballs. We dipped them in hot water for 45 seconds to loosen the skins, then peeled them and seeded them. I felt like a little kid during this part of the process—there was something so satisfyingly tactile about peeling and then squeezing the tomatoes. We then pureed them, stirred together seasonings (following Barbara Kingsolver’s no-longer-secret family recipe), and cooked the sauce.

I had to stay near the kitchen during the three hours the sauce was simmering, to stir it and make sure it didn’t burn. It was a pleasure—an excuse to sit reading Arthur Phillips’ The Egyptologist, one of the better and funnier novels I have read in awhile, getting up from time to time to stir the sauce that smelled heavenly.

The Egyptologist, amidst its satire, is provoking in its reflections on immortality. It occurred to me that our project was in its own way an effort to cheat time. We took a product of summer--ripe tomatoes that would have been destined for compost if not eaten within a couple of days--and preserved them to pour over winter pasta or chicken parmigiana. This seems like a small miracle to a woman who has spent her life in suburbs and urban areas, dining out and making meals using factory-made sauces. We bottled summer.

Plant Rescue

I have never been so glad to see rain as I was Tuesday afternoon. I finally got some help in trying to keep alive the native plants my husband and I had dug up and transplanted this weekend, one day ahead of the bulldozers that are leveling most of a 70-acre woods to create soccer fields and a swimming pool at Southern Community Park. My hope that these plants would readily adapt to their new home was wilting as fast as the 98-degree afternoon sun scorched the leaves of two little dogwoods. (I know transplanting dogwoods in July was an act of either foolhardiness or optimism, but they would have died anyway, so there was nothing to lose.)

I had not expected to spend much of a brutally hot July weekend digging and transplanting plants. By mid-June, I was burned out after spring planting, as I am each year. I was tired of imagining combinations of plants in my garden and researching what might do well in part shade and clay soil while also being unpalatable to deer. I was tired of digging and amending the soil and mulching. I was even tired of watering and had been doing it somewhat grudgingly during the recent days of drought. I vowed I was done with planting until fall. Then I read on Saturday over breakfast about the plant rescue and decided I needed some Christmas ferns.

I adore Christmas ferns. They stay green year-round and thrive in the woods in Piedmont North Carolina. Deer don’t eat them, they don’t need special watering, and they seem to like our clayey soil. But despite their commonness in the wild, they are somewhat difficult to find in nurseries and are priced high, usually at more than $8 per plant.

On Saturday, when my husband and I arrived at the site, I was surprised not to find hordes of other plant enthusiasts competing for free plants. I half-imagined the woods would attract crowds of early risers, as would a closeout sale or garage sale. But we had the area to ourselves.

Despite the heat and humidity, we had fun hunting for plants. We dug dogwoods, what I think are arrowwood viburnums, and the Christmas ferns I craved. They lost many roots in being dug up, so we transplanted them immediately when we got home (ignoring the hot mid-afternoon sun), watered them, and hoped for the best. We enjoyed the experience so much that we went back on Sunday. This time we went to a different part of the site and ran into several others rescuing plants--as well as several handwritten signs saying “Tree Rape in Progress.” I don’t have anything against community parks, but I still feel sad for the loss of one more patch of Carolina woods.

Tuesday’s rain temporarily revived one dogwood, but today its leaves are just as crispy as those of the other two. I remain hopeful about the 18 Christmas ferns, although many of their fronds were flattened by the wind while they rode in the back of the pickup. One arrowwood viburnum looks likely to survive, and the American hollies are looking okay. The vaccinium immediately died, but surprisingly a clump of running cedar (supposedly difficult to transplant) has not yet wilted.

My garden burnout has evaporated, and I have resumed doing rounds in the garden several times a day to check on my plants’ health. My new plants don’t yet look enthusiastic to be in my garden, but once again I am.

Shopping Green

At last, recognition by a prominent mainstream media outlet of the contradictions inherent in the “Buy Green” movement. This New York Times article describes the limitations of green consumerism as a solution to global warming, while pointing out why many major environmental groups have been hesitant to criticize green products: they see them as a small first step in the right direction. “After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, told the Times, “you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants.” Let’s hope.

Prius Envy

I want a Toyota Prius. I drove a Prius. I liked the Prius. The Prius would cut our car-related carbon emissions by more than half. Our most efficient car gets 24 miles to the gallon and the Prius gets between 50 and 60 miles per gallon.

More importantly, the Prius would cut my guilt over having such a large carbon footprint.

How much is it worth to reduce my carbon guilt? The Prius is not nearly as expensive as I thought it would be, with the lowest priced variant starting at about $23,500. Still, we calculated that after a down payment we'd pay about $400 per month for 5 years for the Prius. Hmmm... $400 per month compared to $0 (our cars are paid off.) I feel guilty over my energy use---but not that guilty.

I have been musing about the money aspects of the green technology movement. I will be starting graduate school in the fall and my income will drop in half. So even though I have a husband with a decent income, we're not exactly in a place where we can afford to make large capital outlays to replace energy-hogging cars and appliances. As with most things in America, we are free to make green choices--if we have the money to do it.

Sometimes I wonder what I'm feeling so guilty about. I was raised in the sprawl of suburban Detroit, born into a middle-class culture that unthinkingly relies on the car for all transportation. Sure, I would love to buy a home close to an urban center, but those tend to be too expensive for a social worker and freelance journalist to afford. I have been trying to ride my bike as much as possible, but there are limits imposed by dangerous roads. There are huge barriers to what an individual alone can accomplish with voluntary efforts to reduce carbon emissions. I am implicated in global warming, in a small way, but this problem is not my fault. Buying a Prius I can't afford is not a reasonable solution to an environmental problem with economic, social, and cultural roots.

Trash Economy

The New York Times’ recent article on freegans is a fascinating look at people who are opting out of the capitalist system, living instead as scavengers off the food and consumer items that restaurants, stores, and the rich throw away. I admire the freegans’ courage in living in a manner consistent with their convictions about the greed that characterizes modern consumer society--and the needless environmental destruction that results. I wouldn’t dare—yet. I am still seeking a middle ground, a way to live more sustainably and still participate in the benefits of capitalism.

Some of my motives for wanting to find a happy medium are personal, while others are intellectual. I’m afraid of the social consequences of being too radical in my criticisms of our consumer culture. I want to be liked and not be seen as weird or far out. And I admit: I enjoy buying new things now and then. I’m willing to buy less, but am nowhere close to being willing to live off of others’ trash.

My bigger concern is that the freegans’ lifestyle is by definition unsustainable. If all of us tried to live that way there would be no consumer surplus to sustain us. The only way for masses of people to avoid consumer products is to return to an agrarian lifestyle, raising our own food and living off the land. That is highly unlikely for a host of reasons, not least of which is that the vast majority of people do not own farmable land. So I’m looking for reasonable alternatives to reforming our consumer culture. As part of that search, I’m looking forward to reading Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy.