To Shoebox Or Not To Shoebox?

I have to admit, seeing as it’s already collection week, writing this article kind of made me feel like the person who starts making clucking noises just as you’re about to bite into your delicious fried chicken leg. If you already made a shoebox, please ignore me. If you are eating chicken, enjoy. Merry Christmas to all.

Anyway, a friend recently asked me to look into the ethics of Christmas shoeboxes, which is why I’m writing this. If you don’t know what a Christmas shoebox is, get outta heeeahh. Just kidding. I will fill you in (a full paragraph past the introduction- how rude). Christmas shoeboxes belong to a Samaritan’s Purse initiative called “Operation Christmas Child” and they are rather popular among evangelical Christians. By that, I mean it is not unheard of for a parishioner to actually squeal with glee in the sanctuary upon glimpsing that the box templates have arrived. Anyway. Every fall, millions of flat cardboard thingies are distributed to participating Canadian churches across Canada, the United States and other developed nations throughout the world. They look kind of like this:

I was going to colour it red and green but my stupid laptop, with its recently replaced hardrive, was going to make me pay for a paint app download. The nerve! I’m grumpy.

To the spatially and/or mathematically challenged (aka me), they initially resemble something like a one-dimensional, festive, portly robot. Then you fold them up and the magic of Christmas happens. They become THIS:

Once they have been folded up to assume their rightful forms, folks participating take them home and fill the shoeboxes with various store-bought items such as toothpaste, soap, toys and school supplies. The boxes are then collected and sent overseas to children in developing countries as a Christmas gift.

These boxes have nostalgic significance for me, as I’m sure they do for many other evangelical families. I recall many a 1990s November afternoon spent at the dollar store, poking around for interesting items to put inside (we will use the term ‘interesting’ rather liberally in this case… I still feel sorry for the kids that got my gifts, being that they had been assembled by a small, bespectacled bookworm who thought that HB pencils and Hilroy notebooks were too cool even for school). As I walked my shoebox up to the collection point in the foyer every year, I enjoyed a sense that I was taking part in something special. But is the warm little buzz we get from participating in this initiative year after year enough to justify its continued existence? I’m not sure anymore.

As an adult, this whole shoebox thing has begun to tickle my brains a little. I did quite a bit of research this week on the subject and I have my own opinions, but rather than dictate what I think other people should do, I thought I would frame this article around some questions.

Does Operation Christmas Child Reflect The Values I Believe In?

By its own estimate, Samaritan’s purse has distributed over 100 million shoeboxes since its inception. In my experience, these shoeboxes tend to be filled with mass-produced items, primarily purchased from the dollar store or large chains such as Wal-Mart and Superstore. That is a heck of a lot of cheap product! Besides the obvious question of labour standards and undercutting local artisans, other consumption issues abound. Gifts eventually wear out– especially consumables like soap and toothpaste. Beyond that, it takes a lot of volunteer time and energy, not to mention carbon emissions, to manufacture that much cardboard, inspect the contents of that many packages and ship that many boxes overseas. Samaritan’s Purse has a variety of initiatives on the go, and many of them are considerably more sustainable, such as their clean water project. What kind of real, lasting changes could we effect if all of us were to redirect the money we were going to spend on a shoebox?

Does It Align With Foreign Aid Best Practices?

I’m pretty sure nobody asked for these boxes, and that may be reason enough not to give them. Operation Christmas Child has been around since 1990 and its strategic model has remained basically static. Meanwhile, aid theory has evolved a lot over the last several decades and many aid organizations today are recognizing that it is the local community- not NGOs- who should be identifying the issues and coming up with the solutions, and the role of the ‘aid’ organization should simply be to help localities carry out those solutions in the form of consultation, financial support, infrastructure support, and so on. It seems problematic for a North American organization to simply decide that a shoebox full of soap, toothpaste and toys is the best way to assist a child in poverty, and then enlist the privileged people of the world to purchase all the product and ship it off.
Is It Culturally Appropriate?

According to its website, last year Samaritan’s Purse distributed shoeboxes (among other countries) to Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Iraq and Senegal– all majority-Muslim countries. How is a box labeled ‘Christmas Child’ likely to be received in those regions? I’m not really sure. It is noteworthy that in the NGO world, Samaritan’s Purse is considered a proselytizing organization. In fact, the shoeboxes themselves are often accompanied with religious literature. This may or may not be problematic for you, depending on your own personal beliefs.

A Final Question

My favourite cultural critic and all-around weirdo, Slavoj Zizek, makes an interesting argument about TOMS shoes. We’ll get to that and what it has to do with shoeboxes,* but first, let’s get you picturing this raving Marxist lunatic properly.

wait for it…

There it is.

one more, okay? don’t be scared.

Okay. Zizek asserts that the product’s “One for One” model presents consumers with a false ‘absolution’ for the ‘sin’ of excess. When we buy them, we relieve ourselves of our consumer guilt for a time by having ‘helped someone in need’ and feel free to continue living an excessive lifestyle. We may also feel excused from the harder task of participating in more unwieldy grassroots initiatives that would serve to truly counteract global inequality. I wonder– can a parallel be drawn here? Do I fill a shoebox because I truly believe it will translate into lasting social justice, or is it just something nice to do with my family during the holiday season?
Cluck, cluck, cluck…

Just kidding. Please still be my friend.

* other than the fact that they are shoes and therefore belong in shoeboxes.

Links:

http://www.samaritanspurse.ca/rss/operation-christmas-child/resources/about-this-project.aspx#.VkVqJmRViko

http://www.samaritanspurse.ca/media/342589/Fact-Sheet-2015.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/dec/18/guardiansocietysupplement7  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ebola-crisis-sheds-light-on-controversial-samaritans-purse/2014/08/20/0b9d670a-27b5-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html – 

Resources:

Corbett, Steve. When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty  without Hurting the Poor… and Yourself. Moody, 2014. http://www.amazon.ca/When-Helping-Hurts-Alleviate-Yourself/dp/0802409989

Thrifting.

I beheld a most macabre thing while driving down Fairmount last week.

A most macabre thing, indeed.

It was a wooden guillotine. Small, but not so small as to be rendered un-threatening. In fact, I was getting little shivers looking at it. What was it doing there, abandoned in a parking lot outside Shoppers Drug Mart? As I drove away into the dusk, my mind began forming origin theories, newspaper headline style:

High School Student Channels Spirit of Paris Geller, Puts Unheard-of Amounts of Time into Constructing Near Life-size Guillotine for French Revolution Presentation, Abandons Project near Dumpster Following Soul-Crushing Grade of B Minus

Oompa Loompas Conducting Public Executions Following Infamous Halloween Chocolate Snatchings of 2015

A Really Weird Carpenter Lives in This Neighbourhood

Regardless of where it had come from, I decided that it would be mine. I enjoy all kinds of thrifting, but the best kind of thrifting is accidental drive-by thrifting! Plus Bobby always loves it when I bring home things that we have no use for (yet… mwahahaha). There was a teeny moral dilemma in that the structure had been left in close proximity to the Catholic Charities bin, meaning it was probably intended for donation and and even though thunderstorm season is over in Calgary, I was a little wary of being struck by lightning.

I decided to give it a week and see if it was still there (okay, I forgot about it, but I got really excited when I accidentally drove past it again a week later).

Indeed, Gentle Reader, there yet stood the wooden death machine, looking appropriately weathered and menacing, waiting placidly as if for me. I greeted it as I approached.

“Hello, old friend. How about a trip to my front lawn for Halloween? You’re going to look so… special.”

Luckily, no pedestrians were witness to this monologue because they would probably have turned around with their children and started fleeing in the opposite direction.

I walked around to the front to get a better angle so I could take a picture and post it all smug-like on Facebook, complete with a moody Hipstamatic wash.

That’s when I saw that monstrous machination for what it really was…

The horror! The horror!

I was gobsmacked. By that, I mean I literally had an involuntary hand-to-mouth physiological reaction to my surprise. Then I started giggling nervously like a deranged Edgar Allan Poe character.

After I finished giggling, I went into a sort of daze, still hazy from the shock of having nearly loaded a municipal parking sign into the back of my vehicle. I stared at it a while longer and then, sensing that I would be wanting a physical record of this event for later, reached my arms up slowly and snapped a picture. Then I looked down at Beatrice, who was basically doing the 18-month-old version of this:

Just give me my arrowroot cookie and let’s get out of here before my friends see me

What, you may ask, is the point of all this? I really have no idea except, well, it’s a guillotine, and it’s Halloween, and I couldn’t not write about a guillotine on Halloween.*

Seriously though, I found a lot of great stuff at the thrift store over the past few months while I was neglecting this blog, and I will be sharing them with you in subsequent posts. Surprisingly, I only mistook the essential identity of a few of them before taking them home. Until then, Gentle Reader.

Until then.

*This paragraph is starting to read like a bad Dr. Seuss book.

Displacement.

I am not a science person.

I am not a science person.

I am not a science person.

Just wanted to get that out of the way in case you ARE a science person, because I’m about to get seriously carried away with pseudo-scientific jargon and analogies. Let it be known: I majored in English and minored in sweater collections.

Anyway, I’ve been ruminating on the notion of displacement. What is displacement, you ask? I have no idea. Well, I kind of do. But probably* not enough to qualify me to be writing on the topic. If you don’t know what it is, why in the heck are you writing about it? Who knows? Ask me another.**

Oh, I could post one of the informative YouTube videos I screened but frankly, I got bored looking at them (ENGLISH MAJOR), plus I feel that everyone here can agree on what’s going to happen if I chuck a hardboiled egg into a mason jar full of water.

This isn’t rocket science (let’s face it– this probably isn’t even really science at all. This is just me saying random things) but I do believe the denser material is going to displace the less dense material. As much as it may like to, that egg isn’t going to float unless it’s rotten. And if that egg is rotten, it’s got more pressing problems than whether or not it can pass its swimming lessons.

Displacement theory seems to run in reverse when applied to our lives. It’s not the dense, valuable items displacing the lightweight ones; it’s typically the fluff replacing that which is solid and meaningful.

This week, for example, I allowed the following ‘displacements’ to take place in my life:

 

Chips and twizzlers displaced my healthy eating goals.

The Good Wife*** displaced prayer and meditation.

Facebook displaced playing with my daughter.

A few thoughtless Starbucks runs displaced about $20 in savings.

 

And where was I at the end of all this? Spiritually, physically, emotionally and materially poorer. Nice trade-off.

Why do we allow all manner of soul-sucking crap to force out that which we truly value? I don’t know anyone who would truly rather double-check their Twitter feed for the eighteenth time than go for a nice walk with a friend and yet here we are, ON THE INTERNET, probably not solving world hunger while we’re at it.

I had a good habit going once that I’d like to start rebuilding. Instead of mindlessly logging on to all my social media accounts first thing in the morning and leeching off them all day long, reduced by eventide to an extremely grumpy shadow of my former self, I would take up a sheet of paper and pen and map out a plan for my internet usage that day. A typical list would look something like this:

 

• Find falafel recipe
• Update baby book entries
• Email realtor
• Download diaper pattern, pick out fun fabric
• Pre-order Vestiges & Claws (yaaaaay!)

 

I’ll tell you what didn’t make the cut:

 

• Check Facebook, feel like lesser person after reading about how everyone else successfully cleaned their house, wrote the great Canadian novel and climbed a mountain (and baked a pie)
• Go on Buzzfeed for 2.5 hours, instantly forget everything I read
• Follow ad to clothing website, browse collection aimlessly and feel anxious about all the clothes I don’t own, don’t need and probably don’t even want
• Click on today’s Google Doodle, find out one more thing I never needed to know

 

It wasn’t that I intentionally omitted these latter items, either; it’s just that once I began using the internet regularly as a tool for meaningful activity, my incessant habit of non-essential internet consumption began to calm down. After a day, I was less cranky in the evenings. After a week, I hardly remembered that I had a Facebook account at all.

Now I’m wondering how I allowed this wonderful habit that I enjoyed so much to fall by the wayside. Wait, I know! Displacement!**** I’m a rotten egg!

Seriously, though, maybe that’s the key. Maybe it’s not only the stuff I consume that needs to be more meaningful; maybe it’s my heart that needs to become softer, my desires that need to become deeper in order for me to reach the bottom of that jar. I need to be a more meaningful person. I long to possess what Richard J. Foster calls the inward reality of simplicity.

Okay, enough talking– time for a little doing.

Here’s my list for today:

 

I made a sticky-tab version to keep me honest:

 

If you want to know why I didn’t just make one sticky-tab list to begin with, please see paragraph #2.

 

* Definitely.

** It’s probably in your best interest to stop asking anything at all.

*** That would be the TV show, not me. In case you were wondering.

**** I’m beginning to suspect that the concept I might actually be attempting to explain is buoyancy but do you really want me to start talking about science all over again? I didn’t think so.

Toughies.

Finding ethical clothing is easy… if you’re looking for sage green organic cotton harem pants. If you’re looking for something to wear to the community pool,* you might need to spend a little more time cruising those interwebby waves.

I thought I’d put together a little guide to those harder-to-find socially responsible choices.

1. Socks and underwear

PACT Organic is Fair Trade certified, with surprisingly diverse pattern and colour options. Their prices are comparable to what you might find at the Gap or Levi, but they have good sales. Plus, PACT offers up to $30 off your purchase for making a referral to your friends, so you could be sneaky and ‘refer’ a bunch of people on a mass order (you’d also save on shipping, since it is really costly on this site for some reason). They also offer baby basics! If you’re looking for lingerie, Hanky Panky is a fairly affordable and super comfortable made-in-the-USA option. At a higher price point, beautiful Brook There or the Vancouver-based You and Her have some really special pieces.

2. Swimwear

You are likely already familiar with handmade retailer Etsy, which is where I ordered this Ontario-made sweetie for my chubby little turducken of a baby, and I love these bandeau-style Tankinis from Candystrand. If you’d like to support Canadian-based boutique swimwear, a friend recently introduced me to Nettle’s Tale— appropriate, seeing as the designer’s friends served as her style muses. From sporty Kaycee to vintage-inspired Carli, the heart-gladdening styles reflect unique personalities and lifestyles. Buying swimwear online is daunting, I know, but grab your best-fitting bra (sport or underwire, depending on the style of swimsuit you’re ordering) and a fabric measuring tape and utilize those sizing charts. CARPE DIEM!

 

3. Activewear

Yoga pants. You’ve seen them everywhere. You’ve seen them in a lot of places you probably wish you hadn’t seen them.

I thought I’d have a look for them in a North American factory, now that certain CEOs think it’s dandy for kids to sew things all day instead of go to school.  Oh, by the way, I’m not exaggerating. Read the article and be horrified. I was going to paste a GIF of Jim Carrey looking horrified, but my conscience wouldn’t allow my sense of humour to emerge.

Frankly, between his suggestion that women’s thighs shouldn’t touch together and blaming breast cancer rates on the entry of ‘Power Women‘ into the workforce, I’ve pretty much had it up to here with the arrogant crap he’s pulled. So, as Chip Wilson channels his inner legendary literary A-hole, I’ll be busy recommending a great list of alternative (and ethically sourced) workout clothing. Thanks to another friend for passing this one on to me.

So, yeah. Apparently the day Lululemon outsourced its (allegedly) chafey, (allegedly) see-through pants to China wasn’t the end of the world after all! Did you hear that, Mister Wilson? WOMEN CAN STILL GO TO THE GYM. WITH THEIR THIGHS TOUCHING AND EVERYTHING. THAT’S RIGHT.

 

4. Athletic shoes

“We’re sorry, your search for social responsibility returned no results.” Haha. Story of my life.

When approaching athletic shoes, one must either go barefoot or redefine the term ethical somewhat. The manufacture of running shoes is problematic, firstly because of the large number of outsourced components that comprise an athletic shoe, and secondly due to the large ecological footprint of the petroleum-based synthetics that typically go into their design. For whatever reason, barefoot-style running shoes seem to be ahead of the sustainability game. Ecouterre has posted a handy list of their recommended brands. If you need a traditional running shoe, New Balance is partially domestically sourced, but not solely (no pun intended. Okay, pun intended). Brooks used to offer an eco-friendly design in its Green Silence model, but it has since discontinued the offering with no apparent replacement.

 

7. Bedding

I assumed this one would be a lot harder than it turned out to be. Ethical bedding is actually readily available, so I’m just providing a light survey here.

Fairly paid artisans in India are crafting these splendid patchwork quilts, pieced together from salvaged fabric. I realize the concept of a rag blanket** sounds rough, but the execution is delightful, as you can see:

Sex trafficking is one of those social issues that has saturated our collective consciousness so deeply, it’s easy to repress (and ignore) what we’ve learned about its horrors. Sari Bari has not forgotten, and it is offering at-risk women an artisanal haven.

Basics like sheets, pillowcases and duvet covers are available at Glo Organic, whose fair trade certified organic cotton products are sewn in the USA.

________

Are you having trouble tracking down an ethical alternative to a product you need or want? Let me know in the comments section.

 

 

*legally and without making anyone cry and without having to peruse the bathing suit section of Value Village because, well, yuck.

**And really, aren’t all quilts technically rag blankets? I’ve literally seen rags for sale at Michaels for this very purpose. p.s. I do not make frequent use of the word literally; no, I do not.

The Consumption Myth.

An old boyfriend once told me, point-blank:

“You think too much.”

The statement effectively hammered the Relationship Death Gong because, in addition to highlighting our gross incompatibility and the fact that for me there is no bigger turnoff than a person who doesn’t want to ponder the thematic implications of Dead Poets Society with me EVERY SINGLE TIME I WATCH IT EVERY SINGLE CHRISTMAS, it afforded me a vital moment of existential clarity. I realized that a) yes, I do indeed think too much and b) I’m never, ever going to stop so yeah, later, buddy. Don’t let your motorbike fall over on your way off the driveway. Thinking is awesome. Let’s do it some more now.

Consider, for a moment, the word consumption. What does it conjure? An elderly man reaching for a box of bran cereal in the grocery store? A mother of three standing in the aisle at Payless, pondering a pair of winter boots for her youngest? A couple of guys freezing in an outdoor Boxing Day queue?

We typically imagine consumption to mean the act of purchasing a product. But consumption as we’ve come to understand it isn’t necessarily true consumption. I know this because I am a vocabulary-obsessed egghead and I looked it up. Beyond its typical usage as a term for buying something, consumption has some evocative synonyms– to deplete, to wear and tear, to use up.

Our baby had croup and we had to go to Wal-Mart on New Year’s Day to buy a humidifier. After we left and I recovered from my fury-induced lockjaw, my husband and I were able to converse freely again. He observed that one of the products first visible upon entering the store were Rubbermaid bins. Lots of them.

“Interesting symbolism, huh?” he remarked this morning over breakfast.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I am happily boiling water for his peppermint tea right now and not riding on the back of a crotch rocket.

This is not to shame Rubbermaid bin users– our crawlspace looks like the blue plastic fallout from an unsuccessful Tetris session. Sure, we purchased this useless cache of ephemera. But to claim that we have consumed the items housed under the stairs would be a falsehood. We didn’t consume them. We bought them, we used them (maybe) and then we stored them. January strikes and we try whittling this collection down to seasonal ‘essentials’– camping gear, Christmas ornaments and the like– but as we all know, the pruning back of unconsumable consumables is not for the faint of heart. I haven’t seen the back of the furnace room since we moved in.*

My only resolution this year will be to stop buying unconsumable product. If it’s going to bring me daily utility and value, fine. If it’s just going to sit and smirk at me from the back of my pantry, I don’t want it.

I have devised a consumption taxonomy to ensure my future purchases don’t contribute to the Rubbermaid wasteland. The pixelation is a testament to my fine Paintbrush skills.

I suppose one could argue that ethical sourcing should be the basis of any purchase, and not utility, but I ask you– if you aren’t going to use it, why purchase it at all? Fair trade coffee is a staple in my cupboard, but I’d rather donate to an NGO that reflects my values than slap a fair trade doily on my toilet.**

I encountered a few products over Christmas that fulfill my little triangle.

~ONE~

1.  2.  3.

1, 2 This is my old burgundy leather wallet, which was looking pretty sad after only five-ish years of use. 3 My replacement is a serious quality upgrade from Saddleback Leather, complete with a 100-year warranty. Yes, One hundred. This wallet will be smirking over my grave.

~TWO~

My sister-in-law made some awesome homemade body butter.

It’s light, it’s rich, and best of all, it comes in a reusable glass jar. When I’m finished moisturizing myself, I can prevent my bobby pins from getting lost (maybe).

~THREE~

Following our family’s Flu Faceoff of 2014, I passed on making supper and picked up a rotisserie chicken. Once they’ve furnished forth your meal, these bad boys produce exceptional homemade chicken stock:

Even after I made a huge pot of chicken noodle soup laden with meat, there was still enough chicken left over to make sandwiches for our road trip the next day.

~FOUR~

If you find yourself needing to flee from a Micabella sales representative during your next mall visit, there are a few all-Canadian, aromatherapeutic havens to be found: Rocky Mountain Soap Co., Saje Natural Wellness and my personal favourite, LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics. 

This story begins six and a half blissful years ago, when the lady performing my pedicure during my honeymoon in BC remarked,

      “Are you from Alberta? You have Alberta heels.”

NO TIP. Just kidding. But I do find my heels cracking most winters and, up until this year, had been using Merle Norman Super Lube, an effective but chemical-laden product packaged in non-recyclable plastic.

No longer. Behold:

Lemony Flutter is technically a cuticle cream, but it’s closer in texture and smell to a luscious citrus dessert than to a salve. Think meringue. Marmalade. Turkish delight. Words fail me utterly to describe the multisensory wonder of this delicious spread. Additionally, Lush has a super recycling program; all their packaging is made from post-consumer material and they offer a free face mask to anyone who returns 5 of their little reusable black pots.

To conclude:

Consumption. Good if you’re using things you need until they’re all used up. Bad if you’re playing Oregon Trail.

---

*Except once to make sure a bad guy wasn’t squatting there after I realized I’d left the deck door unlocked overnight.

** I’ve never actually seen a fair trade doily. Presumably the good people over at Ten Thousand Villages wish to spare us from ourselves.

Merry Influenza.

I took a longer-than-expected holiday hiatus due to two consecutive stomach bugs. The right side of my neck remains mildly swollen, like a halfhearted water balloon. Even though the reading and writing of text still render my head throbby, I wanted to share from a book I received from my husband for Christmas. Yes, I love you this dearly. It’s true.

Perhaps somewhere in the subterranean chambers of your life you have heard the call to deeper, fuller living. You have become weary of frothy experiences and shallow teaching. Every now and then you have caught glimpses, hints of something more than you have known. Inwardly you long to launch out into the deep.*

I think this is the reason I started writing. There’s this inner longing that keeps me awake at night, a search for greater depths. I’m tired of going to the mall. I’m tired of bagging up endless belongings that no longer matter to me. I’m tired of seeking material satisfaction. It makes me weary. It is a path of suffering, the suffering of others and my own, and my feet yearn for a different one; the path of justice, the path of mercy.

*Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline. New York: HarperCollins, 1978.

The Found-up: Fall 2014

If you care (and I will totally understand if you don’t) but if you care, I would like to share my latest purchases with you. These items have been made well, sourced ethically and I’m getting excellent mileage out of them.

 

~August~

“Dub” Hooded shirt, Fig Don’t let the name or weird, slightly affected photo fool you– this is basically a glorified hoodie, but it sounds way more legit to say, This is my dub hooded shirt! Actually, that sounds pretty dumb. Moving on, then. This was technically a summer purchase, but I started getting the best use out of it this fall. It was purchased from a locally-owned outdoor apparel store in Nakusp, BC, the Best Place on Earth. It has an expansive hood– seriously, you could hide Frodo from a Ringwraith in here.* Its subtle peplum cut is flattering without being hyperfeminine or trendy and in summary, it’s my favourite pullover.** It’s black because black goes with everything and therefore aids me in my personal trend vendetta against Anna Wintour. Made in Canada.

 

~September~

Striped sweater, Vince This was a Vespucci find and a testament to the incredible value of consignment shopping. This sweater is 100 per cent cashmere (a surprisingly economical choice), in great used condition, retails for hundreds and I got it for eighty bucks. Made in China but secondhand means it’s off-grid.

 

~October~

Navy Pleated Tunic, aka my bulldog peplum methadone, Mini Mioche The design is versatile, but the best part about this garment is that even the fabric is produced sustainably– a rarity worth paying a premium for, in my opinion. I do feel obligated to warn any would-be purchaser that the neckhole is very small, or else my offspring is suffering from a serious case of melon head. I pulled it over her yesterday and she started re-enacting the burial scene from The Cask of Amontillado whilst attempting to fling herself off the change table. Some elastic may be in order. Made in Canada.

 

~November~

Robie button-down, Tradlands Saving the best for last? More like saving the best thing you’ve ever seen in your gosh-darn life FOREVER. When this arrived in the mail, I quite literally chronicled its unwrapping in photos and I am not a photo chronicler.***

My husband can attest to my jumping up and down like a sugar-charged toddler but he’d probably rather forget the whole episode. You can read all about Tradlands and their fashion philosophy over here so I’m just going to blather on about the perfect fit and slow craftsmanship and timeless versatility and how I’ve worn it for 3 days without washing it. What? No I didn’t say that. Made in USA.

 

* Hold the Bucklebury Ferry. Was that my second LOTR reference on this blog? I’m not a geek, I swear. My sister loves Firefly and my brother has more Robert Jordan books than Chapters but I’m normal, I promise. This sort of thing just spews out of me when I’m typing with a beer in my hand. One Innis & Gunn Original and my brain thinks I’m in a pair of flannel PJs, eating Cadbury Buttons on my mom’s couch while tenderly embracing the Tolkien box set I just received for my thirteenth Christmas. Nobody believes me. Okay, fine. I speak the languages of Middle Earth.

** My only pullover, actually, since I became a ruthless closet pillager.

*** If I see one more photo of somebody’s plate of food in my newsfeed, my muscles will rip my sleeves open and I will smash this laptop and never blog again.

Corporate Rhetoric, My Favourite.

I’m beginning to tire of the word ninja* being thrown around whenever anybody wants to communicate the idea that someone is good at something (“My accountant is a number ninja!” “My barista is a shot-pulling ninja!”), but my aunt is a fair trade ninja. Having spearheaded her town’s transformation into a fair trade community and currently sitting as a Canadian Fair Trade Network board member, she really kicks some corporate capitalist butt while remaining one of the gentlest souls I know. Anyway, she said something once that I’d like to recall on this dark day.**

We were discussing Wal-Mart over lunch and she mentioned how much she hates their latest slogan, “Save Money, Live Better”.

“It totally offends me,” she stated in an uncharacteristically aggressive tone, crushing the aluminum pop can in her clenched fist.***

And I get it. What exactly does a multi-billion dollar corporation whose revenue is derived exclusively from exploiting other people’s misery mean by the phrase, “Live Better”? A more apt slogan might be, “Save money! Surround yourself with more cheap product this month than the poor kid lacing up your sweatshop-produced baseball could go through in seventy-six lifetimes!” At the same time, of course, the images they’re running through the commercial make you feel like “Live Better” means “be the perfect mom with the cute hair who lives in That House with the Big Baseboards and Old-School Heating Grates that remind you just vaguely enough of your pleasant childhood to make you feel like you’ve just consumed a big heaping bowl of your mom’s homemade mac and cheese”.

It got me thinking about the incredible slew of corporate ads perpetuating the myth that if we buy more stuff, it will somehow fulfill us on a cosmic level.

The examples you’re about to read are taken directly from advertising I’ve seen at the mall, around town and online. They haven’t been exaggerated or re-worded or any way.

“Expect more, pay less.” More– yes, we can definitely expect more. We can expect more crap on our driveway at our next garage sale. But hey, who doesn’t enjoy bartering with the neighbourhood Weird Guy over a plastic wastebasket?

“Fill your drawers.” Amusing potty double-entendre aside, this slogan promotes the untruth that empty space in one’s closet is somehow an undesirable thing. Space in my closet is something I have worked hard to achieve and maintain over the past couple of years. To me, space represents overcoming compulsive shopping habits; it represents a streamlined and intentional collection of garments that reflect who I am as a person. When applied to life on a larger scale, space promotes wellbeing– healthy relationships, healthy bodies, healthy minds and healthy spirits all result from a healthy margin of space. So I’ll take a pass on ‘filling my drawers,’ thanks.

“You don’t not need it.” I don’t even know where to begin, other than to say that if a student used this sentence in one of my classes, there would be some red pen involved. Beyond its unbearable use of the double negative, I feel that the question really screaming to be answered here is why? Why, in the name of all that is holy, would I or should I ever spend money on something because I ‘don’t not need it’? What sort of consumerist Purgatory are we living in when clothing retailers feel entitled to carve out this amorphous, pseudo-syllogistic no-man’s-land in our minds just to sell us one more thing we never knew we didn’t not need? Anyway, even if I do decide to hang onto my credit card information long enough to play along and bother unpacking this stupid argument, it turns out they’re telling me I do need it, which I don’t, so once again, and finally, WHY.

To all the marketing executives who will never read this, here’s a thought: maybe you could just create a high-quality, long-lasting, ethically sourced, worthwhile product or service that I would like to spend money on in the first place.

*I re-read this line and added italics so nobody would think I was talking about a little word ninja being tossed back and forth. No word ninjas were harmed in the making of this post.

** The day when, as a certain comedian put it, we can all trample each other to death the day after being thankful for what we have (that is, if you live in America. Here in Canada, Thanksgiving is such a distant memory that the trampling’s totally cool).

***This anecdote may have been embellished for narrative effect. Maybe the can-squishing part.

The Finite Wardrobe, Part II.

I’m beginning to feel slightly guilty* for ripping on Anna Wintour knowing that my closet is still a hypocritical hodge-podge. Even though I’ve been working for a couple of years to pare my collection down, I’d estimate that about 25% of my wardrobe still belongs to at least one of these dubious categories:

trendy When I say ‘trendy’, I do not mean ‘stylish’. I mean, ‘I bought this because my naive little eyeballs once read that it was supposed to be in for the season’. After the first few wears, it became painfully clear that oversized polka-dot chiffon blouses do not become these wide shoulders and hips unless I am seven months pregnant, in which case I look adorable. Out of the closet, into the maternity rubbermaid.

 

closet decorator Like some kind of deranged oversized magpie, I decided to line my closet with this at some point because I thought it was pretty. I’m pretty sure my neurons didn’t even fire; it was a strict hand-to-hanger “ooh, shiny!” nervous impulse. Unfortunately, once I brought it home, I realized the lacy part exposed too much lady part. Not exactly ideal for the context in which I was planning to wear this blouse, i.e., in front of thirty teenagers at my Christian school. You are probably looking at these two photos so far and wondering how many times I have to buy something that looks bad before I will stop doing that. WELL…

ethical but ugly At one point, I felt so shopping deprived from constantly putting things back on the rack that the minute I’d see something made in the USA or Canada, I’d buy it even if it didn’t look that great. I hate hate HATE getting rid of items that I’ve barely worn but not as much as I hate being taunted by a surly gang of ill-chosen threads every time I open my closet door. I would take a picture but I don’t think you’re ready for it.**

nostalgic barnacle, irrelevant to current life stage This is a hoodie with history. It is one of two exact replica hoodies I purchased for myself while in University, when I felt a deep need to be validated by my sense of hipster irony. I spilled bleach on the original one, kept wearing it anyway for another 6 months and finally replaced it with Ironic Hoodie 2.0 when the cuffs started falling off. Horrifying, perhaps, but not for the girl who used to wear INSIDE OUT T-SHIRTS TO SCHOOL, NO I’M NOT KIDDING. But my thirtieth birthday draws nigh. These days, I like to wear my shirts right-side-out and no matter how hard I squint, Ironic Hoodie 2.0 doesn’t make me laugh anymore because I am (apparently) a decrepit prune.

Ironic Hoodie 1.0                                           Ironic Hoodie 2.0

I just took all the clothes belonging to these aforementioned groups and purged them (there were lots). My closet looks like this now:

blazerblazersweatersweaterblouseblouseblouseblousebuttondownbuttondownbuttondownhangerhangerhangeremptyspaceemptyspaceTshirtTshirtTshirtTshirtTshirtTshirtcardigancardigancardiganhangerhangertrouserstrousersdressdress

That’s right- I can quite literally visualize every item in my closet right now because each one adds real value to my wardrobe and is in there for a very specific reason.

Full of vigour (from doing this purge) and shame (from shopping poorly enough to make this purge necessary), I hereby declare that from now on, no garment shall cross the threshold of my closet door unless it fits all of the following criteria:

sourced ethically This means that it was assembled in a country with stringent labour standards, or under circumstances where special care was taken to ensure fair labour practices in a country with typically poor labour standards (e.g. fair trade).

purchased thoughtfully I will know what I’m buying before I enter the store, and I won’t leave with anything extra, no matter how cute the bulldog is.

deeply reflective of personal style NOT a passing trend, and therefore won’t leave my closet until it’s falling apart. On that note…

seriously well-made An ethically sourced garment can still shrink, fall to pieces and hit the landfill sooner than it ought to. This US made T-shirt started out awesome but came out of its first accidental encounter with the dryer too snug for Tyrion Lannister.

*not really. She was so mean to Anne Hathaway.

** I forgot to take the picture.

 

The Finite Wardrobe.

This is Anna Wintour.

For those of us who have not a) seen “The Devil Wears Prada”, b) read a fashion magazine or c) been to planet earth, she is the editor-in-chief of American Vogue. In addition to (allegedly) making fresh-faced interns cry on a regular basis, it is also her job to tell us what we, the woebegone masses, should be wearing every season. Wintour’s influence over the Western fashion industry is immeasurable and immense; trends are trends because she endorses and validates them.

Have you ever heard the expression, “Do as I say, not as I do”? Yes, you have. You were probably five years old and asking your dad if you could smoke a cigarette or something. The expression probably both bewildered and exasperated you, because your innocent little Care Bears-watching mind couldn’t comprehend that your parents would tell you to do one thing while they did something else. As adults, we don’t take kindly to hypocrisy. It enrages us when we see it in the news and it alienates us if it happens in our relationships.

So what has Anna Wintour been doing, while all manner of trends have been making their way in and out of her fashion turnstile?

This is Anna Wintour in 1970.

This is a Vogue cover from 1970.*

This is Anna Wintour in 1990.

This is a Vogue cover from 1990.

This is Anna Wintour in 1997.

This is a Vogue cover from 1997.

This is Anna Wintour in 2003.

This is a Vogue cover from 2003.

True, she has posed in the occasional striking, trendy ensemble or sometimes a pie, but after perusing hundreds of Anna Wintour images from the past four decades (I can’t wait to see the ads that Google is going to start customizing for me), I can tell you that far from imitating the trends she green-lights, her own wardrobe is composed mainly of perennial staples and she is almost always wearing some combination of the following:

A knee-length fur coat

A minimalist sheath or cocktail dress falling just above the knee

A bold piece of jewelry, typically a necklace

A plain blouse or t-shirt

A monochromatic tank and cardigan

A collared shirt

A turtleneck

A blazer

A tweed suit

A pencil skirt

Sunglasses

High heels

Beyond her predictable wardrobe basics, her colour choices consist of one of the following, with the occasional addition of an accent colour or print:

Black

Beige

Navy

Cream

White

Gold

I also feel obligated to point out that she has worn her hair the exact same way for twenty-five years.

While we’re talking un-trendy fashionistas– and I realize the point may be rendered less poignant in that he is a notorious crazy man— Karl Lagerfeld wears the same stupid suit literally everywhere. **

And guess what? A Google Image search for Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Vera Wang, Stella McCartney and the Mulleavys reveals a plethora of solid black and a serious lack of patterned leggings.

I may have swallowed “Do as I say, not as I do” as a five-year-old, but the adult version of myself has begun to scrutinize the subtext that titans of the fashion industry are communicating through their own personal fashion choices, which seems to be that trends are to be ignored. Timeless, sustainable fashion choices have been unwittingly advocated to us by the very designers who are constantly coming up with new ways to make us feel out of touch.

*To be fair, she wasn’t working at Vogue when this cover came out.

**His mom once tried to put a diaper on him when he was a baby, but he said no.