1.1.11 seems like the perfect date to start our year of not shopping. Partly because New Years day is the day when you have to start making good on all of the New Year’s resolutions that you made the night before. To eat less, exercise more, start that novel you’ve always wanted to read, and to generally be a better person.

It’s also a great day to start our compact because 1…1…11 is just a pretty awesome date. It’s like January 23, 2045 (1/23/45) or 10/10/10 last year when my brother John got married. I love it when there are cool date numerals like this. I guess I will need to be entertained by things like this for the next year because we are definitely not going to have the entertainment of going to the mall and buying stuff we don’t need for the next 12 months.

This year is going to be different then the last time we did our year of not shopping because we are not doing it alone. This time around we have a group of good friends doing it with us. There is also a group of people doing it in Arizona with my friend Josh Barton leading the pack. I am sure we will share stories and pictures of the group soon, but for now I just share the excitement and trepidation I have about the coming year.

I know that we will be able to do it, but I hope that we are able to learn even more then we did last time. I feel like I got a little bit lost towards the end being in the news and everything and hopefully this time I can stay focused, have fun, and grow in community with the people we are doing it with.

So here’s to a year of not buying anything new.

rules coming soon

We are really excited to start our new compact for 2011. So excited in fact that we are going to have a potluck to celebrate. Everyone is invited to find out more information about the Compact and to encourage each other.

If you want to come RSVP on the facebook page

Elvis will not be there.

A new compact is coming in 2011. We are actually planning on redoing the compact, as in a year of not shopping, but changing it slightly to make it a different experience. We want to cut back, reduce, and live a better life, but this time we will be doing the compact within the context of community.

It was awesome living our year of not shopping as a family but in 2011 we will widen the circle and include friends, family, and complete strangers. So here is our challenege:

WILL YOU CUT OUT THE EXCESS FOR 1 YEAR?

This will look different for each person. Maybe it means cutting out excess TV, food, shopping, or anything else that you may do to excess. If you are interested in being a part of the community email us or join the facebook group.

More details to come on our compact life.

We went into a super expensive store in Canmore a few weeks ago and I found a little sweater tank top deal that I loved for $140. No thank you. But I thought, I could make that. So I went to the thrift store and got this lovely sweater for $5. This was the outcome:

I am quite happy with the result and I can’t tell you how fun it was to cut the mamoth sweater into bits. It was really quite theraputic.

We are five months pregnant, so I have been trying to use what I have for clothes and alter here and there as not to buy a totally new wardrobe. I have been really fortunate to have some good friends lend me some things as well.

I saw a beautiful mobile on this website and I thought I would try it out for our new little one. I love it because it doesn’t look like a Winnie the Pooh mobile, but it is still interesting and I think our little babe will like looking at it. I tried to use more manly colors for the birds (since we are having another little man). I found this drift wood on our camping trip this summer and I have been saving it for this occasion.

I have to get some hooks to put it all together and hang it up.

So, it has been almost a week since our officially official compact came to an end. I have been really quite grumpy this week. I am struggling with feeling guilty and mad when about to buy something or in a place where I could buy something. It is really annoying to myself and others around me (ie: my poor husband).

I have discovered through the years that I am an “all or nothing” kind of gal. I think this is where the majority of my struggle is coming from. For the last year, I have thought of shopping as “bad.” Now that it is “allowed” again, I still have it in my head that it is bad and I think badly about myself when I do buy something. There are some things in life that you just need to buy new. For example, my iron has been leaking water for the last… well year. I have tried to find one at a thrift store, but to no avail. So, purchase number one of this new year, an iron. I bought it from Canadian Tire (at least it is Canadian) but, let me tell you people, I don’t think it is possible to find a fair trade iron! This annoys me to no end, because I can’t feel good about my purchase and I just feel like a consumer again. How do ideals and reality come together in life?

I think I am a little broken and I need to give myself a break. I am a conscious consumer. I do think before I buy. I am not going on a huge shopping spree of things I don’t need. I am just having a little difficulty adapting and not living a life governed by strict rules. Not having strict rules is harder for me than having them.

As 2008 drew to a close last night Malora and I both felt very proud and relieved about what we had done throughout the past year. We went an entire year without buying anything new. No shopping malls – No Old Navy. Nothing. We didn’t cheat or break down and we stayed the course for one whole year.

It was an interesting journey and I never expected to get the attention that we got. I think Malora and I have both been significantly changed in the way we view our relationship to money and the stuff we buy. I think we learned to be more generous and view everything we have as a gift from God.

So what’s next? We got an email from a guy who encouraged us to keep the compact going indefinitely. Although I agree that we do not want to end this fast by gorging oursleves on consumption – I think that our year long experiencement of the Compact life is over. Now we have the difficult task of living within (or below) our means in a consumeristic society. It is much easier not to be consumed by shopping when you have rules against it, but the real test is living within that society without being consumed by it.

As we struggle to find balance within the culture of consumption we will continue to write posts about our experiences. The experiment is over for us – but the experience is not because it has deeply altered who we are and how we live in this world. There are definitely certain principles and rules that we will live by now that I will expound on later. We have become conscientious conscious consumers.

Thank you to every one who was a part of this journey with us. Thank you for the encouragement, prayers, emails, comments, and ideas. Thank you for reading our blog and being an integral part of this past year. Thanks for sharing our story. We are very thankful for everyone who has been impacted in any small way by our compact life.

So that’s it. Our year is over – but our new life begins today.

I posted last week that we were going to be on the CBC National news. We got bumped from the program that evening and we were not sure if we were going to be on it at all. It was kind of embarrassing because we told a bunch of people that we were going to be on – then we weren’t. Oh well!

I got some emails this morning saying that people saw us on the CBC news last night. We looked online and we found our cute little story on cbc.ca. It is really cool that we got to be on TV throughout Canada. If you saw it let us know, if not I have posted the video here (still working on it – I have a link to CBC site).

It is really encouraging to hear the stories of people who have been inspired by what we did and now are trying to make small changes in their own lives. I guess that was part of the purpose behind why did, what we did this past year. The encourage others to reconsider how their consumption affects their lives and the lives of the people around them.

Click here to see the video

We made it through Christmas in our year without shopping. Christmas was the one holiday that I was worried about because it is the most obviously consumer based holiday (next to groundhogs day). The music, art, and spirit of Christmas are all bound up in the trappings of gifts and shopping. No more ranting on that.

It was the first Christmas in a long time that Malora and I did not get the “Christmas blues”. The feeling of disappointment that Christmas is over and that it didn’t live up to the hype. It is so nice to bind Christmas up in Christ instead of what presents we can give and get. When you focus on the true meaning of Christmas instead of the consumeristic meaning of Christmas – there is absolute meaning to the holiday.

We have less then a week left in our compact life and I can feel the temptation coming back to shop. I sort of wish we could continue this little experiencement on for the years to come, but I think we need to take a sabbath from our sabbath. Malora and I will both share some closing thoughts in the days a head. But for now I have a qoute from a really good book I am reading by Shane Claiborne called Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers:

The moment that we are no longer tempted by the “pots of meat” the empire offers, we should be concerned – for if we can’t feel the temptation , we have probably already given in to it (pg. 45)

I have been a busy little elf trying to get Christmas gifts ready for one and all. Well, not really all. A few. I wanted to show my new Christmas card I created that I am really quite pleased with. I was able to reuse brown paper bags from some mushrooms and from Planet Organic (I forgot my cloth bags the other day). And I re purposed some magnetic poetry that I haven’t been using for a while. Here is the end result:

I used some fun green thread the fasten the brown paper to the card. It was super easy and I think they are cute.

Here is Noah’s Sock monkey thus far. I still haven’t committed on the cape.

Also, I found this wonderful idea on the Wee Wonderfuls blog. It is a cute little bookmark which I think everyone can use. So, here is my simplified version of her fabulous idea:

So there you have it. A few super simple little gifts for Christmas. I have a few others, but a certain someone may be lurking on here and find out what he is getting before the designated time;)

We were featured on CityTV’s Breakfast Television. The host, Dave Kelly, interviewed us about our past year and our eating habits while driving. He was a really funny, nice guy and I think we will definitely tune into BTV more often (once we get rabbit ears that are not broken). It was a lot of fun being on the show and I am glad we can share the video online.

Noah stole the show – as usual. Especially the outro with him waving! Click on the picture to go to the video or click here