vegan issues

The Best Vegan Gift Guide You Will Read This Year– Happy Holidays!

December 10th, 2012

Come gather ye readers round the yuletide log, and open your presents I wrapped for you in leaves and twine.

In other words, it is time for the Holiday Gift Guide!

Now you have all been very naughty. Since none of my lovely readers suggested any vegan gifts via my fascinating facebook page, I guess this gift guide is going to be all about ME.

As a recent vegan, (I used to be just vegetarian) these are the items I truly WOULD want for X-Mas. I know I have probably written about most of them before, but sometimes I get a “collect them all” mentality. I fixate on the same things…and the longer you want something, the more you know you want it, right?

My list, if you please….

These awesome Jcrew-esque vegan mens boots. I have them in black. I splurged, but they are so great I want them in tan. Be warned, these are very UNfunctional boots sadly. They have literally NO traction and if you wear them in the snow you are truly living dangerously, but they look so cool…..HA. Available at Mooshoes.

Worker Boot in tan from Brave Gentleman X Novacas $250

I do not yet own a shoe from the inimitable GOOD GUYS. After doing my Interview with them, I feel like I just want a piece of the company. I now know so much that went into the company, how nice and cool the people behind it are, and the adorable vision for the brand. I like these red desert boots the best. They are so cute.

ayita red desert boots from The Good Guys

I have written about these before as well, but I still want them. Once I saw this girl wearing a mini dress with over the knee boots, probably not an uncommon occurrence, but I thought it looked amazing. These are from vegan company Cri de Coeur.

Olivia Tall Boot $180

Ok, Allison’s vegan gourmet chocolates look really good. This is a necessity since I’m dying for chocolate. Every time I’m in the store, I look at labels of chocolate hoping to find vegan chocolates–haven’t found any yet! I want the toffee from here.

Vegan Toffee from Allison’s Gourmet. I can’t look at this anymore…..it looks too good!

A weekend getaway at the Bed and Breakfast Guesthouse at Woodstock Farm Sanctuary. So…I read The Lucky Ones, the creator of the Farm Sanctuary’s Book. I found parts of it quite hilarious, and although the farm is closed to visitors for the winter, if you stay at their cabin, you can spend time with all the animals. I’d love to see for myself what it is like to spend time with rescued farm animals. I’ve always wondered what farm animals are like…never having been lucky enough to get to know one.

A place where you can count sheep to go to sleep? VERY dreamy.

Well, this pink bag is still on my wishlist… I wish I knew the exact shade of pink as screens can be deceiving.

Vegan Pink Bag from Modcloth $54

The last time I went to mooshoes in NYC I was really impressed with the look and quality of this bag from vegan company Matt and Nat. It was beautiful! Better in person.

Matt and Nat Malone bag $135

You can never go wrong with anything from Lush. After reading the incredibl, thrilling and eye opening book Free The Animals by Ingrid Newkirk this year, I realized that it is just as important not to support testing on animals, as it is to not buy leather or wool etc. Animal testing, especially and without a doubt for things like cosmetics, is horrific. Lush is amazing in that they do not even work with any suppliers who support animal testing. So much of their stuff is vegan, and I feel like they were one of the first companies to bring veganism into the mainstream with things like their bestselling VEGANESE conditioner. They also do animal rights demonstrations. They are a really unique cool company. Ok, how about some bath bombs. You can’t go wrong.

Lush Bath bombs. $ 4-10

Ok guys, this one is for the edgier among you. I forget if I posted this on this blog, or my other one, but I think Harnesses are a really cool look to add to your outfits!! Yes, I am talking about wearing these out in public over t-shirts and evening wear… They are very edgy. 1 time I wore one out over a grey worn t-shirt and not only did I feel like the coolest person in the room, and everyone asked me about it…I was the coolest person in the room because of my AUDACITY to wear one of these babies in day. These became pretty mainstream a while ago. Topshop was selling them…but of course in LEATHER. I searched for non leather options….buying mine from the pole dancing wear shop Body Binds. I love mine! However I found these on etsy today–Vegan Harnesses!

Sorry for the nudity in this photo! I think these are mannequins anyway. I recommend wearing over clothes for a XENA warrior princess/Anjelina Jolie in Tomb raider kind of look.

Miss Malwia’s Etsy Store

Also check out Body Binds (made from elastic so definitely vegan).

10.

For the 10th day of Christmas….I would like a print of a photograph by the amazing Jo-Anne McArthur. Her photographs are so beautiful, moving and meaningful. They express so much that can only be felt. She is going to be the subject of a film, The Ghost in Our Machine, that I think is going to possibly change the world.

I will soon be talking more about this as I have an exclusive tell-all interview with the DIRECTOR of the film….hehehehe. You will love it.

Anyway, this is the print I would choose.

This says EVERYTHING about our relationship to animals. “an animal” and a “human” gently touching hands. It is like they understand in this instant how similar they are, and yet their lives are so different–two different fates. One can help the other. Both can help the other. I think animals are one of the most beautiful and mysterious things on earth. It is a gift we get to know them and spend time with them.

That’s what all this gifting and being vegan is about anyway…trying to do what we can for animals. They do so much for us by inspiring wildness and magic in us.

True art.

Jo-Anne McArthur’s prints start at $125 dollars and can be purchased here.

Merry HoLIDAYS, HAppy Chanukah, Festive Solstice to you….

And please, any other gift ideas I have missed…comment below!

3 comments

Animal Rights Books and Musings About a Dome of Happiness and Love

November 13th, 2012

Hi guys,

Well thanks to this blog my interest in animals and veganism has really grown. I have been reading up a storm about animal rights-ish things.

I just finished Jenny Brown’s book The Lucky Ones.

She is the creator of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, this sanctuary I keep hearing about in the news.

The book tells her story beginning when she was a little girl and developed cancer and had to get her leg amputated at 10 years old. She recovered from cancer and blossomed, telling hilarious stories (truly hilarious. I was literally LOLLING) about growing up in her small town of Louisville with a fake leg but still being a cheerleading, big hair wearing, down and dirty catfighting “redneck” teen of the 80s.

She explains how she gained a passion for animal rights, doing extreme Peta demonstrations where she was almost arrested, and then using her film school background (she went to film school) to go undercover into the stockyards of Texas to film downers…animals that are too ill or weak to move but are just going to get killed for meat anyway so are still dragged by chains to slaughter.

The book made me even more clear about certain things, which the last book I read Free The Animals by Ingrid Newkirk (mostly about lab animals really) made me feel in heaping quantities.

I would really recommend the book. It is a page turner too. I flew through it in a few hours.

It also describes how she started an animal sanctuary…a dream of mine.

I posted on my facebook page this quote from her book about how sometimes she imagines as she is going to sleep this protective bubble over her, her husband (whom she describes meeting in the book–cool story and cool person. he left his life in nyc to live with her on the farm), and all the animals who have been rescued from horrific concentration camp like situations on her farm who are living happily. She said sometimes she imagines, like, a beautiful dome where all is right with the world. People and animals are loved and live together…The way things should be.

I wish I lived in such a dome.

Sometimes I really miss nature and animals living in NYC. I have to be among nature.

As I was walking home after finishing the book, I stepped in a used bookstore for further reading.

Y’all know me, I love to read.

I picked up a book with a great title…A Day No Pigs Would Die. The image of the dome from jenny’s book reminded me of this title, so I had to check out this book.

I knew it wouldn’t be pretty cause I had read some illuminating amazon reviews of it.

Basically it is a coming of age story about this young boy who raises a pig from a piglet. They sit together in the heather and clover in the fields and talk to each other and grow up together.

Oh wait. His father is a butcher. The boy thinks his pig is going to become a breeding pig and have a long life. Uh oh. His pig, Pinky, turns out to be barren.

In a climactic scene which I will ruin for you because I do not think animal lovers will enjoy this book, the father kills his son’s pig and forces his kid to watch. There is a very gruesome scene that could only have been written by someone who saw pigs get butchered.

The dad is like, That’s life son. I hated doing it, but life sucks. I’m glad you’re a man now at least.

I have to admit that there is a very powerful moment in the book. The dad’s fingers are covered with the blood of his friend, Pinky the pig. There is snow on the ground and it’s red with blood and pink sludge. It’s a bloodbath. The son is wailing and balling his eyes out.

Then suddenly he begins kissing the blood covered fingers of his father. It was to forgive him. It was to tell him that even if he killed him, his own son, the son would forgive him.

Wow. Doesn’t that just sum up love in a nutshell.

Anyway, the book is so typical of the heavy handed and traumatizing books they have you read in high school. But, you know what, it is powerful. It sums up people’s attitudes about animals in the past. They don’t think. They do what their fathers before them did. They have to be butchers. They have to kill for food.

They could have survived the winter on fermented foods like sauerkraut, pickles, and potatoes and rice.

But no, there had to be meat. And a son had to learn to be a hardened man. Even if that meant watching his bff be murdered by his own father.

In the last chapter of the book the father dies. And now the boy’s journey to being a man is complete. Life is hard and immoral and unjust and that’s the way it is.

He is all set to be a hardened farmer like his father.

A great lesson (sarcasm). But that’s the way some people do feel about life.

Anyway… just some thoughts.

Have any of you read either of these books or do you have any good book recs for me? I would really be interested to know.

Thanks for stopping by and I will have some cool new vegan shoes to show you in my next post.

oh and find the blog, which I call MyNonLeatherLife on Facebook if you so desire.

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