Food, festivities and shopping: all of our holiday stories organized in one place.
FREE & FABULOUS | Too bad other big brands and major retailers don’t adopt Swedish fashion megabrand H&M’s approach to gift-wrapping, because if enough of them were to do it, gift givers would be able to wean themselves off wasteful wrapping paper in no time flat. Read more
BEAUTIFUL & EASY | We’ve used a combination of origami light cubes and bare LED bulbs (in a ratio of 1 boxed light to three bare bulbs) on every Christmas tree we’ve decorated in the last dozen years. The origami boxes produce beautiful, diffuse squares of light, something you don’t normally see on a Christmas tree. Some years we’ve chosen to box only white string lights, but mostly we box multi-coloured ones. To make our boxes, we worked with vellum squares (available at art supply stores or online) that deepen and intensify whatever colour light they cover. Read more
GIVE & GET | The fourth annual winter One Of A Kind show and sale got underway yesterday at Vancouver’s Convention Centre West (it continues through December 11). Frugalbits was on hand bright and early to scour the isles for cool stuff coming out of the studios of the more than 300 mostly local artisans and designers who are participating this time around. While plenty of items caught our eye at this holiday shopping extravaganza, products from the following three companies actually enticed us to buy. Read more
HOLIDAY 2011 | While artificial trees come in hues to match your decor, real Christmas trees are green in more than colour. They are a renewable crop often grown on land unsuitable for cultivating much else, they remove carbon from the air while they’re growing, and they can be chipped for mulch after use. Here are three ways to get an eco-friendly green tree this Christmas. Read more
SLAM DUNK | The next time you are asked to bring cookies to a book club, meet-up or exchange, try making the ones pictured here. After their taste, which is amazing, the fabulous thing about these caramel-covered slabs is their pan-generational appeal: sophisticated enough to seduce discriminating adults and gooey-good enough to reel in the children.
EASY DOES IT | This whole pumpkin-decorating thing has gotten crazy out-of-hand in the past few years, with elaborate designs like the filigree-carved jack-o’-lantern pictured here that’s posted on Martha Stewart’s website (CLICK here for more of her beautiful ideas). It’s not exactly easy to cut through a pumpkin, let alone arrive at a design like this one (can’t imagine how long look it took a pro to do it). We propose getting back to basics with quick and simple pumpkin décor like the two options offered below. At the very least, going easy on the pumpkins will give you more time to perfect your costume. Read more
ENTERTAIN SMART | Unlike Christmas dinner, which is usually reserved for next of kin, our Thanksgiving meals invariably involve friends who always ask, “What can we bring?” We used to suggest things like wine or light hors d’oeuvres, and would then slave away in our modest-size kitchen to churn out everything else: a photogenic bird with all the trimmings, four sexy sides and a few scrumptious homemade desserts. Read more
HOLIDAY SHOTS| My longtime friend Elyse is an incurable romantic who still lives in the big, old house she grew up in surrounded by furnishings that belonged to her mother (who had exquisite taste), and interesting, idiosyncratic things she and her husband, Ben, have acquired over the years.
While both Elyse and Ben have careers that distract them, they are determined to stay focused on family at Christmas, making time for (at least a few) rituals that result in strong memories that contribute to their family’s story. For as long as I have known them, one of the things they do every year is take silly Santa pictures, and I love visiting their house over the holidays to see them set out in individual frames, their three kids, who are now young adults, looking progressively more sheepish as the years go by posing on some random department-store Santa’s knee—and then finally reaching an age where you can see in their pictures that they have embraced the tradition and find the experience kitschy good fun. Read more
Last year in an effort to simplify my life, I looked into buying an artificial Christmas tree, preferably one that came predecorated and opened and shut like an umbrella: I could pop it up before Christmas, then collapse and store it till next year. Then I discovered that the whole point of a Christmas tree is to bring evergreen trees or branches indoors as reminder that winter will eventually end and the world will turn green again.
Real Christmas trees are green in more than colour as they are a renewable crop and often grown on land unsuitable for growing much else. And like any crop, there are different shades of green.
WASTE NOT | The first Christmas morning my husband spent with my family was a culture shock. Before we opened our presents, my mother handed each of us a knife, which we used to carefully slit the adhesive tape instead of ripping the paper off in the mad frenzy my husband was used to. When all the presents had been opened, my mother collected and folded the paper to save until the following year. We would no more have thought of throwing it out than tossing the Christmas ornaments after dismantling the tree. Read more