I’ve tried to shop as small and as locally as possible this Christmas. I follow so many gorgeous small businesses and designers on instagram and this image designed by Lola Hoad has been ALL OVER the site… used by so many small shops to promote this more ethical way of shopping. It’s been a tough year for us financially. Joel having no job until the month before my Mat leave… hasn’t left us many spare pennies… so I can’t pretend I’ve not had to price stalk things and turn to amazon a few times… but I do so love hunting around to find different and unusual things and so hopefully next year I will be super rich (lol – no I won’t) but I hope I’ll be able to stick entirely to this challenge and totally miss out the big supermarkets and online giants and stick to buying from good people who work hard!
Today our activity was to spend a bit of time and have a nice christmassy walk to shop locally to us. I wouldnt normally shop this close to Christmas but the idea of not having the car and having no pressure as we didnt have anything we HAD to buy made it seem like a nice idea. We had a bit of Christmas money from my aunty to spend… so I let them have a look with that in mind, Elijah wanted to buy Holly a ‘sorry’ present for leaving her to do his tidying up this morning and I’d promised hot chocolates… so the only rule was no chain shops… so independent shops and coffee shops only. No starbucks.
We had a fab time. We spent ages in a quirky little bookshop. It’s one of those with the smallest shop front… but then it goes back and back once you get inside… IF you can get past the piles and piles of books that create an uber obsticle course. There are just so many books in there – its quite overwhelming. Joel had a long chat about them stocking his so we had time to scan the first layer and chose these 2 amazingly beautiful books. I am a little prone to a pretty version of Alice In Wonderland… I MAY have a couple of nice ones already…but this one contains other stories and it is going to be Niema’s… and it was WAYYYY too pretty to leave there.
Mookau is one of our fave shops. Everything is pretty and Elijah got Holly a ‘sorry’ pen. Couch did us an amazing couple of coffees and hot chocolates while we used their board games for a girls v boys round of battleships and then B Biscuit was rather adorably full of gorgeous little clothes. I fell in love with a lion hoody… and a tiger one… and then the cat version and most of all the zebra… but we stuck with a Christmas set of maracas for Niema from the older 2 and I might save the dressing up shopping for next year when she’s a bit bigger. Eeek!
Some of our lovely finds along the way…
themoneyspendingexpert.com 