Interesting Christmas gift - a better future

Every holiday season I face the same daunting task: buying gifts for people who already have everything they want (or are just really picky - LOL). Normally John is one of the more difficult people to buy for, but he was very easy this year. He's been looking at a specific piece of Gucci luggage (www.gucci.com) for about a month now - so this year he was the easiest to buy for. For some reason, this holiday season, I couldn't settle on the perfect gift for my stepmother, Susan. Just like the rest of our family, Susan is an amazing person. Intelligent, kind, caring, and thoughtful are just a few of the adjectives I would use to describe her. She reads quite a bit so I thought perhaps a good book would be the best choice, but that I realized that with the quantity of books she reads my chances of sending her a book she hasn't read are fairly low. In the past I've sent various gift baskets with various edible goodies, but for the last few years they have taken to going on a 20 plus day cruise in January... so I figured if I sent food there was a high risk that it would spoil while my parents were traveling. She speaks highly of the various spa treatments on the cruise line (www.princess.com) so I did entertain the idea of purchasing an on-board credit for them... but that became a little bit of a logistical nightmare, so that idea was cancelled as well.

Then, it finally came to me. I should point out that part of her amazing persona is her passion for politics and environmental causes. I to my favorite online search engine (www.dogpile.com) and typed in the simple phrase "save the rain forest." I was happy to find about seven sites that boasted the opportunity to "save the rain forest, by paying to preserve one acre at a time." I looked through the various sites, and then double checked a few other sites to ensure that I wasn't buying into a scam. I finally settled on purchasing an acre in Susan's honor from the STARO (Save The Amazon Rainforest Organization). I picked STARO (www.staro.com) because it appeared to me to be much more personal then the other organizations.

So, I purchased an acre of rain forest for her. I think she'll like it... and I feel like my gift is a little more special then the other things I might have given her. Whether you buy into the global warming issue or not - I've always believed that it just can't be a good thing to cut down all the trees! Plus, you get a neat full color certificate.

Thanks for reading!

~W