On the couple of blogs I follow regularly, in the last two months before Christmas there happens a huge inundation, a mass attack of gift guide posts. It gets worse and worse every year. And I get more and more irritated, when I visit a website to look up some, ya know, apartment makeovers or fashion trends in New York (bear with me), and instead I get a gift guide post. And another. And another. And…

Not only is it boring, it’s also the exact opposite of the ethics I’m trying to live by. I get very irritated seeing how all these blogs blatantly promote the worst kind of consumptionism. (I know, I should just stop looking at these websites – but I’m a sucker for a good makeover…)

Well, I somehow survived the period before Christmas, and was happily burying my nose in fashion trends and apartment makeovers again, when just now one thing made me start again. Gift guides are back! For Valentine’s Day!! People, do you have no mercy!?

As a remedy, I decided to formulate my own gift guide. For any occasion. According to the principles of zero waste and common sense.

Here it goes:

Don’t. Buy. Anyone. Anything. Ever.

There’s four exceptions to this rule:
1. Something that someone has explicitly expressed interest in
2. Books. But only good books.
3. Food and drink.
4. Bolesławiec pottery.

Ok, the last one is an inside joke. On our first ever trip to Poland together, my boyfriend was very charmed with a brand of pottery that is quite well known in Poland and hand-made (using the same method since the beginning of the 19th century) in a factory in Bolesławiec, a small Polish town. We bought ourselves some vessels, and some for my boyfriend’s parents as well, as he was positive they would love this kind of thing. They did, and this precedent started a little tradition where every now and then we present someone in the family or among our close friends who’s off to a new start in life (marriage, new house, new baby…) with a little set of pottery from Bolesławiec. They don’t seem to protest. Yet 🙂