Thanksgiving wrap up; Hanukkah ideas needed!

My organic turkey was fantastic! Brined for 24 hours, it was the tastiest bird to ever come out of my oven. Despite minimal use of fresh flowers, my table was beautiful (see photo). Local apples were a knock-out in the apple pie my mother-in-law and husband created.
Now if I could just figure out a way to have a green Hanukkah, I would be pleased with my transition to greener holidays. Any suggestions?

The First (greener) Thanksgiving Report Card

Though my ancestors hardly came over on the Mayflower (my grandparents and great-grandparents were Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island), I enjoy getting ready for Thanksgiving and hosting my friends and family every year. This year, I am trying really hard to reuse, reduce and recycle. Check out what I am doing below, and then tell me if I get an A or not.

Reuse
I set my table with items that I use every year: my grandmother's delicate china, my mother's beautiful silver, and my very favorite festive tablecloth. I also make use of antique serving bowls on my table, and except for paper napkins, I do not use any disposable items. Before I serve dinner, I mix and match my appetizer plates along with serving pieces I have picked up at garage sales to create a homey setting for hors d'ouerves in the living room.
I reuse the food I serve, too. We eat leftovers, of course, and I plan to use the picked-over turkey carcass and the giblets to make a classic turkey stock. Extra whipped cream (homemade from organic whipping cream) is great as a post-Thanksgiving treat in coffee. Cranberry sauce tastes delicious on turkey sandwiches. And my dog loves table scraps!

Reduce
Kudos to my in-laws who win the prize for reducing fossil fuel the most of any of our guests. Rather than fly in from the lovely city in South Carolina where they retired after way too many freezing Midwest winters, they travel the 900+ miles to our home in their Toyota Prius. My father-in-law, famous for his frugality (driving costs less than flying), is really an environmental hero in my book.
I will reduce the environmental impact of raising a turkey this year by buying an organic turkey from Whole Foods. In the past, I have bought a natural turkey from them, but I am looking forward to the authentic flavor and lower environmental impact of the bird I will cook.
On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, I will head to the final farmers' market of the year here in Evanston. It takes place indoors, and though local farmers cannot offer up the delicious tomatoes and peaches of summer, I will stock up on locally-grown apples for a pie my husband has promised to make, sweet potatoes for the annual sweet potato and marshmallow fluff side I must make or my friend Grace will never speak to me again, and Brussels sprouts, for a healthy addition to our laden table. I hope to pick up leaks, radishes, carrots, and some locally-made organic goat's milk soap. By buying as much local produce for my feast as I can, I will help reduce the use of fossil fuels needed to bring in produce that might travel much longer distances.
I will also substitute local pumpkins, gourds, and dried flowers on my table and throughout my home for an abundance of fresh flowers. I love flowers, but buying a big bouquet of flowers flown in from a tropical place does not do much to reduce my carbon footprint. Plus my daughter and I plan to use mini-pumpkins to hold the place cards at our table. They look great, and writing out 15 names on cards certainly keeps an 8-year-old busy.
And though we all love left-overs, I plan to cook slightly smaller amounts of food this year. I do not want to toss out any food left in my fridge that I discover, say in late December.

Recycle
Feel free to check out the recycling bin in my alley on the Sunday night following T-giving. Not only will it contain many empty wine bottles (Grace's husband, Bill, became an oenophile when their now teen-age triplets were babies--he spent a lot of time at home then, understandably--and he always brings wonderful wine to our table), but you will also find clean sparkling organic cider bottles from the kids' table, all the clean paper goods we did not need to toss into the garbage.

greener dry cleaner?

Admittedly, dry cleaning does not have many redeeming features. It's easy to list all of the environmentally detrimental steps involved in the process: First I load dirty clothes into my car and use fossil fuels to drive to the dry cleaners to drop off the dirty clothes, then the dry cleaner uses chemicals to clean my clothes, and when the clothes are clean, the cleaners swaths each clothing item in non-reusable plastic, and hangs each item on its own metal hanger, and finally, I use fossil fuels to drive back over to the cleaners to pick up my clean clothes. The whole scheme is no better then say, driving an RV cross country. (Well, maybe not that bad.) Short of not ever setting foot in a dry cleaner's again, is there any possible way to improve this environmental sink-hole? (There no green cleaners where I live.) I recently started collecting those flimsy wire hangers instead of tossing them out, and when I had filled a recyclable Whole Foods bag full of hangers, I brought my loot back to my dry cleaner, and he accepted my recycled hangers handily. I don't think that my dry cleaner is enormously worried about global warming, I think he likes the money he saves from not needing to buy new hangers, but no matter: I bring my used hangers back with every visit.

stealth composting

It's pretty common for couples to hide things from each other--credit card statements, shopping sprees, dirty laundry, even illicit affairs. In my attempts to lessen my family's impact on the environment, I try to get away with something a little more basic: adding coffee grounds, egg shells, and those biodegradable salad containers from Whole Foods to the compost machine in our backyard.
Why do I have to secretly gather the brown ends of lettuce, peels from apples I turned into applesauce, and used tea bags, and then sneak this collection of biodegradable trash outside when my husband's not home? Why can't I take dead flowers from vases and the now scrunched-faced Jack-o-lantern from the front entrance to our house and openly place these unwanted items into the black plastic compost machine in the corner of our yard in full view? Because my husband says the machine is nearly full, and that new additions will not turn into compost. He states then we open the machine next spring after a long, cold winter (of course, it could be 52 degrees in January like it was last winter), instead of finding a pile of rich dirt to enhance my vegetable garden, we will find trash. He has told me repeatedly that the little tops of string beans that I tried to sneak into the compost several times will not degrade into their basic components in the next 6 months. The smelly onion peels will still be just that--smelly and a bit rotten, but not part of a lovely mix of healthy, sustainable earth, ready to sprout vegetables in my 2008 garden. He has begged me not to add any more apple cores (chopped up a bit, so they degrade a little quicker) or broccoli stems to the compost machine until the current contents fully degrade next year.
I am the early riser in this family, though, and he is still asleep. I could throw my sweater on over my pajamas and run into the backyard with this morning's coffee grounds. I could throw in a mushy banana from the fruit bowl that no one wants to eat. Even the extra noodles that our daughter's sitter left cooked but untouched in the pot on the stove last night could go right into the compost machine. Shhh....

Why my greener life?

Welcome to my blog, an online forum with useful advice on how to lead a more environmentally-friendly life. Why did I call my blog 'my greener life'? I wanted to call it 'mygreenlife,' but frankly, I am not there yet. I am an urban professional, and like most of my counterparts, I drive a car, I heat my home with natural gas, and when I plug my laptop into the wall to blog, I not using wind power, but electricity from a big coal-fired power plant in my state. My husband and I want to lead more environmentally-friendly lives, but we cannot afford to install solar panels throughout our house. I applaud wealthy celebrities who choose to make such enormous, expensive changes, but for now, we are starting with the smaller things. We recycle almost every scrap of clean paper. We bought a compost machine last spring. We reuse our grocery bags, and turn off the lights when we leave a room.
I hope you will join me as I tell the blogging community about the simple, every-day life changes that almost all of us can make in order to reduce our impact on the environment. I look forward to blogging about mygreenerlife.