I hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving had a lovely holiday. We had a quiet day here since it is just me and James. James spent a big part of the day in the kitchen cooking. He says he doesn’t ever mind this because, like the garden is my favorite place to be, the kitchen is his. Nonetheless, I still feel guilty for sitting around, greedily reading seed catalogs and books. He gets tired of me asking whether he needs any help. I suppose how I feel while he’s working in the kitchen is similar to how he must feel when I’m out working in the garden for hours.
James is healing well from his surgery. The glue they used on his incisions is peeling off. He can lay on his side at night in bed. And he can get the rice cooker off the top of the fridge. He is not allowed to lift over ten pounds for another month, so I get to be the muscle in the house; all the core and strength training I do in addition to my bicycling is paying off! It’s kind of fun being the one who gets to swoop in and take care of the heavy things.
Along with all the Thanksgiving yumminess I devoured the Fedco Seeds catalog. Not only will I need to begin gardening in the adjacent yards of all my neighbors, but I’m going to need to get in on some kind of farm subsidy to afford all the seeds—prices have gone up! I’m pretty good about saving seeds, but when a girl wants to try different varieties or something new, seed must be bought. There are still two catalogs I am waiting for, and once I get those I can begin comparing prices and varieties, and then I will need to begin paring down and getting realistic. Ha!
We got a little snow in the early hours this morning. The chickens were completely offended by it when we opened the coop and left the run door open for them to free range. Lucy cracked me up. As she walked up the garden path through the snow, she’d pick each foot up extra high and hold it there a second before putting it down. I could imagine her thinking, What the fork is this shirt? If she had lips they would have been crinkled up in disgust. She squawked a few times to let us know just how unamused she was. She has seen snow before, this is the third winter for the Nuggets.
Lucy and Sia came up to the deck and smashed themselves against the sliding glass door in the little space that did not have snow because it was under the eaves of the roof. And then it got windy. So instead of going into the run out of the wind and snow, all of the chickens ended up underneath the deck smooshed against the house. They will be closed up in their run for the duration soon enough, so I understand their refusal to give in to the weather.
The sun came out in the afternoon and melted the snow off all the hard surfaces, and the sidewalks and streets are clear and dry now. We’ll be well below freezing Monday, just below freezing Tuesday, and then pop up to five or more degrees above freezing for the rest of the week. In spite of the cold, I’m pretty sure November is going to end up being our “warmest on record” for seven months in a row in Minnesota. But it isn’t much of a surprise since 2023 has been the hottest year on record globally, and on November 17th, the global average temperature was more than 2C above pre-industrial temperatures for the first time ever.
There are many things that contribute to global warming, and as we enter the holiday season when we are exhorted to buy! buy! buy! slow down a second and think. That cheap plastic tchotchke is cute, but do you really need it for a stocking stuffer? I mean, it’s just going to break and end up in a landfill where it will degrade and the plastic will then end up in our water supply and in our oceans and food and in you. Do you want that?
Consider instead making cookies or bread or crafty gifts made from natural materials, or promises to help weed the garden, pet sit, babysit, go out for a meal together. If you must buy gifts, find some thrift store treasures, or if buying new, make sure the gift is made from natural materials. Yes, these might be more expensive, forcing you to buy less. But one well made, beautiful gift is worth more than a bunch of poorly made plastic things that will break within a year.
I know it’s hard to not pay attention to those “Biggest Sale of the Year!” emails and the bright and shiny ads on the internet and TV. But if we truly want to keep the world from being permanently hotter than 2C all the time, then we need to stop being consumers. Make the holiday season less about buying stuff, and more about giving real gifts that actually mean something. And what better gift can we give than a livable planet for future generations?
Reading
- Book: Old Babes in the Woods by Margaret Atwood. I never fail to be impressed by Atwood’s consistency in top-notch writing as well as her creativity, deep observation, and, of course, her wry sense of humor.
- Essay: A Climate of Trauma by Jem Bendell. Looking at the climate crisis through the lens of collective human trauma. We all have personal traumas, but living in the world we do, we also suffer from a collective trauma. Bendell explores what that means for us as individuals, for climate activists, and for those powerful elite gathering in Dubai for COP28
- Article: Forget dystopian scenarios—AI is pervasive today, and the risks are often hidden. AI was around before ChatGPT hit the internet—Alexa, self-driving cars (now banned from San Francisco’s streets), facial recognition, programs that decide who is worthy of a loan or who a company is going to hire. Discrimination is written into the algorithms and pervasive in the datasets used to teach AI. There are so very many problems that are swept under the rug. I have lots to say about it and hope to write a whole blog post one of these days.
- Poem: The Earthlings by Matthew Olzman
Listening
- Podcast: The Great Simplification: Fossil Free Food Systems. A discussion with small-scale organic farmer Jason Bradford, permaculturist Andrew Millison, regenerative local agriculture activist and writer Vandana Shiva, and regenerative Minnesota farmer Daniel Zetah. How do we feed 8 billion people without fossil fuels? Can we? It’s a great discussion. The answer is yes, but… If you don’t want to listen, there is a PDF transcript also available at the episode website
- Song: Preach by John Legend
Watching
Nothing
Quote
Do not pray exclusively to the ancestors of the land; make room also for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through cracks with the first musical notes of worlds to come. In the mispronunciation of your bodies by the displacements of the moment, unspeakable worlds glisten.
Bayo Akomolafe
James’s Kitchen Wizardry
James made our usual Thanksgiving meal: vegan enchiladas, refried beans, rice, and pumpkin pie. He makes everything from scratch. We have discovered that our fermented red jalapeño hot sauce has mellowed a bit so we were able to add more than a cautious dab. Everything was so delicious!
I’m so glad that James is doing well after his surgery, you’re so lucky that he loves being in the kitchen! I hope that you are also able to see Monty Don in the Gardeners’ World BBC programme, although it is having its winter break at the moment. Global warming in Scotland means a lot more rain and we had plenty to put up with before!
LikeLike
Thanks Katrina! Yes, we sometimes watch Gardener’s World, we can generally find older episodes on YouTube, so we tend to watch them in random order 🙂 Oof, yeah, if you already got a lot of rain, getting even more is no good!
LikeLike
I react to snow like your chickens do!
We mostly buy books as gifts. A book delights everyone I know and love.
LikeLike
Haha Jeanne! Do you at least like watching the snow from indoors where you are warm and cozy? Books as gifts are the best!
LikeLike
Happy Holidays! WOWZA YOWZA on that poem. LOVED it. Letter on its way – got the P/Q postcard Saturday, I think. 🙂
LikeLike
Thanks Care! I agree about that poem!
LikeLike
Your story about the chickens reminds me of my cat Tasha who was with me in my 20s and the first time she saw snow. I put her down outside after a light dusting of it and she did the same foot shaking thing as Lucy and then tried to get all four feet off the ground at the same time. But she did enjoy watching it come down from a warm spot inside.
Great suggestions for meaningful holiday gifts! And artists and crafters always appreciate supplies or tools they need or covet.
I’m really glad you are going to be raising questions and writing about AI. It’s an issue that I feel especially strongly about. Technology companies (or any company), should be required to be completely transparent about where and how they are using it, and the rest of us should start pushing back against the pervasiveness. Why anyone feels comfortable having something like Alexa in their home is beyond me.
LikeLike
Heh, poor Tasha!
Oh yes, I love giving gifts of craft supplies in the hopes of the person using them to make me something 🙂
Alexa scares the poo out of me, especially since it is well known it hears everything and Amazon uses and sells the data it collects. I will get to that AI post soon!
LikeLike
It’s 25 degrees this morning and my chickens are not pleased! I did get to go out this morning with boiling water to defrost their water, and it was beautiful and frosty. One bonus to cold weather! I love your gift ideas. I always give handmade gifts to our neighbors and friends. This year it’s concord grape jelly and red wine, rosemary, and fig jam. I was also thinking of you this weekend as we distributed ALL THE LEAVES all over the beds and borders in the yard. I usually try to shred them but this year I’m going with whole leaves — maybe they’ll just need some chopping and mixing in the spring? We’ll see! Happy holidays!
LikeLike
I know you are so good Daphne about the handmade gifts! The fig jam sounds heavenly! We never shred our leaves. They take a little longer to decompose, but they still get there eventually. 🙂
LikeLike
Your Thanksgiving meal sounds delicious. I’m glad James is recovering and that you are able to be his helper. I agree about gifts, not only for ecological reasons but because it puts a lot of meaningless pressure on what should be a quiet, lovely holiday. I’m definitely pulling back on that this year. Your ideas are great! Who doesn’t love something yummy to eat or help doing a chore?
LikeLike
Thanks! And right, no one needs the pressure of gift shopping for the holidays. If you enjoy it, great, but how many people actually like it? And also, if someone gifted me a couple hours of weeding in my garden I’d consider it one of the best gifts ever!
LikeLike
I thought for sure James would make tofurkey. Do you two not have any family nearby? I’d ask if you considered traveling to any family, but I know you guys bicycle everywhere.
LikeLike
Tofurkey tastes terrible! We do not have family nearby. My mom and sister live in California and James’s family now all pretty much live in New Mexico. Since James has always worked in retail and had to work the day after, we don’t have the ability to take time to visit family for Thanksgiving. Besides, we’d have to make our own meal anyway because none of family cooks vegan. So it’s a nice chill, just us holiday 🙂
LikeLike
That sounds lovely. Right now, with Christmas looming, everything feels confusing. For my family, 2023 has been probably the hardest, most confusing year on record. I get the feeling I just need to show up and be there and what happens, happens.
LikeLike
I spend a lot of time thinking that people aren’t really on opposite sides of issues as much as often or boldly as the headlines suggest, BUT I think when it comes to gift-giving it might be that extreme, with people who think like you and James (we’re the same, here) and, then, the majority of the privileged west’s (too general a term, really) population. For those who are not rethinking their consumer habits, the kinds of gifts that are acceptable to me (taking into account modern-day slavery, other ethical concerns, environmental impact) are not the kind of gifts perpetual-consumers want and I’m beginning to think that opting out is a better solution in these instances. Also not a popular decision! Hah
LikeLike
The holidays are so fraught when it comes to gifts Marcie! My family is huge into presents, but long ago James and I stopped sending gifts and instead began making charitable donations to places like Heifer International. This got mixed responses. Some people reciprocated the following year by making a donation. Most people stopped sending gifts completely, which was fine, and others stopped sending gifts and complained very loudly about how rude and inconsiderate we were. I pretty much only have my mom and sister left these days and send digital gift cards to places I know they like to eat. For local friends, they usually get cookies or a jar of homemade granola 🙂
LikeLike