Mother Knows Best!

Go Green! Save the Planet! Global Warming! The warnings are days late and several dollars short. My mother was WAY ahead of the times because she was recycling before Webster made it an official word in the dictionary.

As the oldest of seven children, I can say with all sincerity that my mother taught us not only the value of a dollar but how to stretch the greenback until you could see through it. We learned to wash tin foil, rinse plastic bags, save twist ties and bread bag clips.

 

We saved every empty jar or plastic container. I never knew that Tupperware was an actual brand name. I thought it was a plastic container - any plastic container.

 

Recycling is in my blood. It is my nature and nurture that I find recycling to be not only an art but in these tough economic times, a matter of necessity. We should all make a firm new year resolution to return to the three Rs - reduce, reuse and recycle. BYOB - bring your own bag to the grocery store and reduce your carbon footprint a toe at a time.

 

It is cutting edge these days to be green. My 80 year old mother is green from head to toe and great grandkids are learning to follow in her giant footsteps for humankind and good old Mother Earth, because that is what a wise grandma would do.

Live and In Person

Welcome to wisegrandma.com. Good to be live and look forward to blogging my way through what is now "officially" a recession. I don't think this is news to most of us and for the rest of you, don't worry. Many of my readers lived through the Great Depression and suffered far more than we are now. The main thing to remember is that you can always find someone in a worse situation than you.

So here is my tip for the day. Roll those pennies. Yes, I said pennies. Every year since we were married, my husband and I saved our pennies in a mason jar we left on the kitchen counter. Come Christmas time, we sat down and rolled all the pennies in the jar. I think our kids loved doing this because we would dump all the pennies out onto the table and the pile was quite impressive. They would sift their hands through the pennies, like King Midas himself. After painstakingly counting the pennies into neat little piles of ten, we would place them in wrappers and stack them in pyramids on the table before us. The number of rolls determined the size of the tree we would purchase.

At the time, $10 would buy a pretty good size tree, often having to be trimmed to get through the front door. Now we are lucky if we can rub together $20 in pennies for an average size tree, but none-the-less, it has become a tradition of family fun. It inspires saving and earning, not to mention the sigh of beauty when you see the tree sparkling with ornaments and lights, knowing you grew that tree one penny at a time.

My kids no longer chide me about picking up a penny on the street because they know that's what a wise grandma would do.