Your Oklavore Holiday Gift-giving Guide - Part 1 -- the Stocking Stuffers

Here's Santa's best advice:

Make this holiday season a gift to yourself and also to justice, sustainability, and the common good, by purchasing gifts from Oklahoma producers for family and friends this year. The Oklahoma Food Cooperative can help you do good and give you great value as you shop. Anybody can go to a big box store and buy cheap schlock made by big corporations that practice injustice towards their employees and pollute the earth with their business activities. Why not give unique gifts that keep our money at home and thus help promote prosperity for all Oklahomans?

So let's take a brisk walk down the street and open the door into the Oklahoma Food Cooperative's Holiday Store. Wow! This looks like something our grandmother would love.  A display of dried flowers, boughs of fir and cedar, Indian corn, pumpkins, pine cones and a gorgeous tree trimmed with painted squash and gourds, draped with hand-made garlands, and home-crafted ornaments. The first place we're going to look at is a very festive holiday bargain boutique, where everything is priced at not more than $5.00.  There is a festive painted sign over its entrance -- Ye Old Holidaye Stocking Stufferings!

Buy Quentin a Horse.  First thing I noticed was a little sign, "Buy Quentin a Horse" on the Crosstimber's Farms table. I asked the jolly young elf whose name-tag read "Airman Eric" who was minding the store what that meant.  He said, "Quentin Lusby wants a horse, and his mother said that if he wanted a horse, he would have to buy it. So he has taken up knot tying and is making paracord lanyards and bracelets/wristlets." The lanyards are value priced at less than five bucks each, so let's buy Quentin a horse for Christmas by buying some of these lanyards as stocking stuffers.  I am using mine as a key chain and it is working great for that purpose and I'm getting  some more for friends. 

Moving along, we come to the Scented Home section and there is just an amazing complex scent about that corner of the store. Once Upon a Silver Moon has quite the selection of incense priced at $5. The scents are quite amazing. Skyridge Farms has some potpourri's priced just a bit above $5, and Soy Candle Cottage has linen sprays in the $5 range.

The Pet Department is very well stocked with value priced items. For those of you who like to feed birds, Rowdy Stickhorse Wild Acres has suet cups and Lasley Farm has bags of peanuts for bird feeders under $5. Cat's love wheatgrass, and High Tides and Green Fields has clamshells of it for less than $5. Honeysuckle Hollow has cute little kitty toys made from handspun yard. Proceeds help Leava feed her little colony of feral cats that she watches over. Atoka Lamb has lamb bone dog treats at less than $5 your dogs should adore. Barker and Friends is offering a great deal on its sampler of doggie treats for less than $5. Certified organic? Cattle Tracks has doggie bones and chews for less than $5. The busy crew of the Lusby family at Crosstimbers have several less-than-$5 gifts for your animals including shampoo bars and Hannah's dog treats. High Tides is offering their famous hand-made catnip mice for your favorite furry feline friends.

Coming now to  the Paper Arts Department, well, the mind almost boggles at the selections, as in "there are hundreds of things to look at here".  All of the following are $5 or less --

• Guided by the light handcrafted cards,
• Happy Rabbit Acres/Main Street Photo handcrafted cards
• Renricks handcrafted cards
• Skyridge Farms, handcrafted cards with handcrafted paper, some of which have wildflower seeds implanted.
• A Little Hippy Shop has a cute collection of window stickers.

 Escaping the Paper Arts Department  with some checks left and positive balances on the credit cards  . . . we run into the Kitchen Department. Every kitchen needs cute stuff, and there is a lot of it in the value aisle. We all know we need to ditch our paper towel habits, and Fluffy's Compleat Boutique has gorgeous tie-dyed kitchen towels in the $5 or less range. If you have a refrigerator, you have a need for kitchen magnets, and Main Street Photo/Happy Rabbit Acres has refrigerator magnets galore!

Next we check out the Jewelry Shop where we see that A Little Hippie Shop has great hemp bracelets and peace sign bottle cap necklaces. Once Upon a Silver Moon has fairy dust necklaces.

It's hard to leave the jewelry section, there is so much to look at. But we must move on and so we enter the Home Decor Department. They are doing it right.  There's an elf in the corner picking Christmas carols on a guitar. He must be the famous Rednecked Elf that we've all heard so much about. His Santa hat has a bill that reads "Billy Ray's Used Sleighs".

First thing we see are some gorgeous beeswax candles from George's Apiary. Then we see Once Upon a Silver Moon as Arkansas quartz crystals by the ounce from Mt. Ida, as well as a selection of herbal pillows. Beautiful Jewelry Items has Good Deed Beads which are 10 beads attached to a wooden cross.

In the Fabric Arts department, we find some fine phat quarters I mean fat quarters for the quilters in your family. Seems to me like you could just put a hem around those and they would make great napkins so you could ditch your unsustainable paper napkin habit.

The Children's Department features two great bargains in the $5/or less Holidaye Stuffings area. G-J All Natural Beef has its Redneck Genius Game, and the Little Hippie Shop has a cute hippie flower hair clip.

The largest department in the Ye Old Holidaye Stocking Stufferings area is the Bath and Body Care Department. There is an almost dizzying array of artisanal products at value prices for your gift-giving pleasures. And don't forget the guys.  Guys need great body care products. You'd be surprised at the number of  manly men about this coop who have a stash of artisanal soaps for their regular enjoyment.

• Joi de Dee -- bath salts, lip balms (big selection of flavors), foaming sugar scrubs, soaps, foaming liquid soaps,
• Rowdy Stickhorse -- soaps "almost too numerous to list", mustache and eyebrow wax, natural cotton wash cloths, soaps,
• Crosstimbers Farm, hand lotions, deodorant body powders, foot butters, shampoo bars, lip balms, face cream, hand and body lotions, crochet wash cloth, soaps, drawstring bags for soaps,
• Clear Creek Lavender lip balm, soap sachets, soaps,
• Soy Candle Cottage lip balm, Mom's candle, facial scrubs,
• Laughing Rabbit Soap -- soap bars, 
• Medicine Woman Soap -- natural hand sanitizer,
• Honeysuckle Hollow, shea butter soaps,
• Once Upon a Silver Moon, soaps,
• Heaven Sent Food and Fiber, soaps

Accessories?  We got them, for men and for women.

• Chartreuse Lily -- mirrors (various designs), coin pouches, key fobs, travel tissue packs, 
• Fluffy's Compleat Boutique -- scarves, dyed long shoe laces

That's quite a list, don't you think?  BUT WE AREN'T DONE YET!  You can give FOOD as a gift, in fact, people are known to ADORE gifts of Oklahoma foods. And there are LOTS of $5 or less food items that would make great gifts.  So let's wander over to the HOLIDAY TREATS section of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative.  Oh good, there's samples.

• Earth Elements Market Bakery -- cookies by the dozen,breads, brownies, cookie doughs, muffins, jams
• Snider Farms -- peanut butter cheese ball, peanut nugget candy, peanuts - various packages and flavors
• Bohemia -- Chocolate/honey caramel love bars, Crownies, bars
• Concina San Pasqual -- brownies, fudge, green chili salsa,
• Renricks -- cheese spreads, dip mixes, glazes,
• Peach Crest -- jams
• Wildhorse Canyon Farms -- jams/jellies, 
• George's Apiary -- flavored honeys, spun honey, 
• Honey Hill Farm -- honey, 
• Lasley Family Farms -- peanuts, roasted and flavored

I hope this gives you some great ideas for what you can buy for five dollars or less through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative.  Tomorrow, I will give a tour of the extravagant gifts -- those starting at $100 and going up from there!

I hope everyone is having fun eating their way through this bon appetitin' feastin' season!  We certainly are at our house.