Think Outside the Box: You can do better than Black Friday,

Remember the first time you gave your father or mother something you made? It was far from being trim and neat and tidy, but their smiles told you it was perfect. Handmade things are like that. The tablet you are thinking of getting someone is exactly like zillions of others, generic, impersonal, mass-produced by near-slave labor and obsolete in three years.

The money goes to an anonymous corporation with whom the closest contact you will ever have is the logo on the box. It does not have to be like this, and the choice is yours to make: Give something made locally, by hand, be it craft or artwork. It was made by someone here, not slave labor, and all the money (save taxes) stays in your community, where the multiplier effect enhances your expenditure and grows all around you.

Your gift may not do calculations or facebook, but it will always remind the recipient of a special time in your lives, a time all your own -- forever. It may seem at times like those days are gone, but they are still right here, and now. Seize them, think out of the Big Boxes, the mobs and servility to big corporations. Love the Future through the present. Buy it from one of our own, for one of our own.

--- Luis

Remember the first time you gave your father or mother something you made? It was far from being trim and neat and tidy, but their smiles told you it was perfect. Handmade things are like that. The tablet you are thinking of getting someone is exactly like zillions of others, generic, impersonal, mass-produced by near-slave labor and obsolete in three years.

The money goes to an anonymous corporation with whom the closest contact you will ever have is the logo on the box. It does not have to be like this, and the choice is yours to make: Give something made locally, by hand, be it craft or artwork. It was made by someone here, not slave labor, and all the money (save taxes) stays in your community, where the multiplier effect enhances your expenditure and grows all around you.

Your gift may not do calculations or facebook, but it will always remind the recipient of a special time in your lives, a time all your own -- forever. It may seem at times like those days are gone, but they are still right here, and now. Seize them, think out of the Big Boxes, the mobs and servility to big corporations. Love the Future through the present. Buy it from one of our own, for one of our own.

--- Luis