Socially conscious Christmas

So this year, I’m working a lot on trying to keep with the spirit of Christmas in the post-ghost Scrooge fashion, to make my business “the business of mankind” in our family’s gift-giving.  Living a long way from any members of our family makes it a bit challenging to avoid the shipping costs, but hopefully our choices of company’s we are buying from help with this.  Here’s a minor list which helped us to keep things in the micro-economies of small, socially concious businesses we chose to buy from:

1. Women’s Bean Project
2. Arizmendi Bakery
3. City Art Gallery
4. Worlds Alive

It has been a lot of work, but I’m realizing how much easier this is using the Internet compared with the past, where I’d be shopping at local shops to support them, but the choices would be more limited and I wouldn’t always know where products were coming from.  I tried to get a good mix of local and national businesses, and I even managed to get a gift certificate from a local restaurant near my folks to have them try something new, good (hopefully), and local.  I’d never have been able to do this in the past…amazing.

Change.gov

Is anyone following this on a regular basis?  I find Change.gov an interesting experiment in goverment–somewhere between a town hall and the fireside chat.  Thus reports the site:

Throughout the Presidential Transition Project, this website will be your source for the latest news, events, and announcements so that you can follow the setting up of the Obama Administration. And just as this historic campaign was, from the beginning, about you — the transition process will offer you opportunities to participate in redefining our government

Have you visited the site?  What was your impression?  Will this be a sign of the new administration’s greater openness?  Will this eleveate the discussion for all of us and create a sense of participation by the population which has been missing?

I feel like Ron Jeremy talking to his dog, Baxter, who claimed to have eaten an entire wheel of cheese: “No, I’m not mad; I’m impressed!”