Dreaming of an Organic Christmas

I admit to being a little overly thoughtful about what we feed the kids, bearing in mind of course that I could be a lot worse. While I am not militant about things being organic and local, I do tend to avoid, whenever possible, artificial colors, sweeteners, and high fructose corn syrup. This isn’t so unreasonable, is it? When you really get down to it, if someone handled you a chemical and told you to eat it, would you? And yet, we eat them all time in our food. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

Either way, it’s not that difficult to avoid this stuff, except in certain areas. Candy comes to mind, and because of this, the kids tend to eat candy that I would prefer them not to eat, but I don’t want to be the mean, stuffy parent whose no fun. I’m already too adept at that. Plus, you can’t monitor them all the time, just so long as they don’t eat candy made in China. You have to draw the line somewhere.

This issue crops up all the time with candy canes. The kids love candy canes, but you couldn’t find an all natural candy cane if your life depended on it. Without fail they have artificial colors in them. It’s easy to find gourmet candy canes (which are expensive) that avoid the HFCS, but again, there’s always something artificial. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

Until now, that is. I was at the Upper Valley Coop and lo and behold, they had all natural candy canes. They were colored with natural beet dye. How cool is that? We also found something else that is cool - all natural fair trade chocolate advent calendars. In the past, we’ve given the kids the cheesy made in China paper advent calendars, which are good for a few cheap thrills, but in the end are poorly made. They’ve also received ones with chocolate inside them, but you have no idea where that chocolate came from or where it was made. Actually, scratch that, it’s obvious the chocolate was made in China. I wouldn’t want our kids to eat that garbage, it is without exaggeration, like eating wax.

The chocolate advent calendars were also inexpensive, so it was kind of a cool thing. Plus, the kids are never ones to turn down chocolate. Now all we have to work on is making a gingerbread house that we can actually eat, which may be getting in over our heads, but that’s just how we like it.

As Eleanor Roosevelt said, we must seek to do that which we think we cannot do.

Until then, thanks for reading.