GroovyGreen.com – Start Today :: Save Tomorrow

For Christmas this year, or solstice for that matter, my family and I will be making several batches of cookies, packaging them up, and delivering them to our neighbours and friends. It is perhaps not as green as preserving ten acres of tropical forest, but in these cookies— along with the butter, slivered almonds, and candied fruit—are some of the key components of building a more sustainable holiday ethic.

First, there is the fact that they are homemade. Consumer culture has pervaded every aspect of our lives, from Hallmark Cards to bottled water, and Christmas has become the grand celebration of consumption. Buying sustainable products can be good, and supporting local merchants is better than buying imported stuff, but there is no substitute for the homemade.

The homemade cuts out the excess, everything added along the way—the processing, packaging, shipping, and marketing. More importantly, the homemade adds a quality that mass production can never achieve: individuality. Consumer culture is founded on uniformity, but a homemade cookie is always unique. It may not be perfect, but it has personality, carrying something of the spirit of its maker.

We will be packaging up the cookies in customized, hand-decorated little boxes—not a lot of cookies, perhaps 10 or 12, but good, a focus on quality over quantity. We will walk to our neighbours and hand deliver the packages, perhaps stop in to visit and catch up.

The cookies aren’t necessarily for our closest friends and family, but for our neighbours and the people in our local community—the people we buy our eggs from, the mechanic who fixes our car, and the eccentric gentleman across the road. Our society has become so far flung and dispersed with endless driving, flying, and delivery of packages over the holiday season, that we can forget the people closest to us. But these are the people we most rely on in a crisis and the people we need to work with to build local networks of trade and mutual support.

And while cookies can’t create community, they can build social capital and cohesion. Sharing food is the essence of human caring and we hope our Christmas cookies are a small step toward a more sustainable community. And tasty too.

Zane Parker