owl fly away

Wishing you a blessed and peaceful Christmas season.  Hope yours proves as wonderful as ours.

We got our Christmas tree this last Saturday, strung lights on it immediately and now we will wait till Christmas Eve to decorate it.  This tradition is such a nice homage to Advent because I find myself anxious to get the tree decked out but have to wait and look forward to the day which makes me appreciate the here and now.  It also gets me nice and excited about the coming Christmas season.  There’s something lovely about the simplicity of a lit tree with no decorations that I’m really enjoying right now.  So for now our beautiful, bigger than it needs to be, tree will sit and wait with us for the celebration of the birth of our Christ.

*Here’s a little insight into my brain; one of the first things I thought of when we put it up was  how empty the house was going to look when we have to take it down…I’m working on losing my pessimistic nature.

**Blurry image replaced by sharper shot thanks to husband.

I found myself discussing this topic via email twice already this morning which seems to be a pattern of late.  So I figure I should address it here as well since it is quite important.  Instead of rewriting what can be found here, I’ll post a snippet of the article and encourage you to visit the site and send letters to your congressmen and senators.  Here’s what I’m talking about…

…”The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008.  Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.

For small American, Canadian, and European toymakers, however, the costs of mandatroy testing will likely drive them out of business.

• A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.
• A work at home mom in Minnesota who makes dolls to sell at craft fairs must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.
• A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.
• And even the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.

The CPSIA simply forgot to exclude the class of toys that have earned and kept the public’s trust: Toys made in the US, Canada, and Europe.  The result, unless the law is modified, is that handmade toys will no longer be legal in the US.